


To Sit a Dead Man Between Us

by imochan



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Death, Did I mention angst, Hogwarts-era, M/M, MWPP, Sex, Violence, post—hogwarts, spans multiple-eras
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-30
Updated: 2015-01-30
Packaged: 2018-03-09 16:29:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 53,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3256691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imochan/pseuds/imochan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the beginning, the middle, and something of an end.</p><p>(originally written and posted in 2008)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. This Book is Not About Heroes

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is the longest, weirdest, saddest, most complicated bit of writing I've ever done, and it was originally completed during a very surreal and emotional time, both in life and in fandom. I've put off posting to AO3 for a very long time, both because I still hate so much about this fic, and also because it's become very personal and upsetting over the years, but: here it is!

******PART I** ** **

******This Book Is Not About Heroes** ** **

 

There is a preface, thinks Remus.  Here, it's _here_ that's where it is?    
  
There is, he thinks, a beginning somewhere in this?    
  
There is a small boy sitting at the end of the Slytherin table.  He has thick-dark hair, and thin-pale skin.  He has a familiar nose.  He is watching them, and he only takes six bites of his chicken stew.   
  
“He looks sort of ill?” says Remus, who knows a thing or two about that, after all.    
  
“Are you going to eat that,” says Sirius, who Is Not Looking.  “Who?”  
  
“Isn’t that,” says Remus.  
  
“No,” says Sirius, and takes his dinner roll.  “It’s no one.”    
  
Ah, he thinks.  And, _yes.  I think so._  
  
  
\--  
 

_There is a piece of the moon missing. A dark and hungry sickle, and a patch of the sky gone imperial and wrong, it muffles the edges of the light. It silences things: his throbbing head and too-thin blood, their voices. It means they sit side-by-side-by-side on the edge of the bed and think about speaking more than they do. (He thinks about screaming,_ he _thinks about luck, and how that had nothing to do with it.)_  
  
_He would have died, says Remus, once. You know._  
  
_He could have died, says Sirius. He looks at the blood under Remus’s fingernails, and the veins of his wrists, and knows suddenly, quietly, that if he stands now, his own body will not hold him up.  Because he is tired of it, he thinks, he is tired and lightheaded with Remus’s stupid, stupid, relentless encouragement._  
  
_That’s what they say, right, he says. So. So, fine._  
  
_So, says Remus. So, there’s that.  
  
_

  

\--  


  
Sirius smiles at him, and he thinks it’s disgusting. Sirius gives him the last cigarette, even though James had called it hours ago, and it makes him want to crush it between  _both_  palms. On the way out the portraithole, to Herbology, Sirius tosses him his old leather jacket, and the feel of it on his back makes his neck break out in goose bumps for the next fifteen minutes. A house elf brings him a cup of tea at four o’clock on a Sunday, and Sirius does a very bad job of looking chuffed, and it makes him want to upend it over Sirius’s bare feet. Sirius misses the opportunity for a jab at his ambiguous manhood, and he feels insulted.   
  
But he smiles back. But he smokes it, anyway. But he wears it for hours. But he drinks it. And he is, somehow, not cruel, though James disagrees.   
  
“It’s been two months,” says James, after they emerge from forty silent minutes of detention for singing spitballs in History of Magic.   
  
“What?” he says.   
  
“And six days. Two months and six days. He’s driving me spare.”   
  
He shoulders his book bag; he shifts his feet.   
  
“I haven’t said anything,” he says, finally.   
  
“I know,” says James.   
  
“That’s not particularly unusual,” he says.   
  
“I  _know_ ,” says James.   
  
“Oh,” he says. “Right.”   
  
  

\--  


  
  
_Right, says Sirius. I know that._    
  
_Remus has a bruise burning the skin under his jaw, where his teeth have dislocated and reset. Since it looks like you’ve been screaming, thinks Sirius, clearly, because you have, maybe, you did, maybe, so you don’t think we need to, anymore._  
  
_It could have been worse, he says._  
  
_Right, says Remus. It could be worse._    
  
  

\--  


  
  
It was midway through the winter of 1977 when a Hufflepuff first-year named Willie Coverton, whom no one really knew, fell ill with a fever, went home to his parents in Cobham, and died of the whooping cough in his bed.   
  
And it filters slowly, the news of it. There is the Quidditch match between Gryffindor and Ravenclaw, after all. There is that Potions essay, you know, and the lake, you know, finally frozen over for skating, and didn’t you hear Torpal Goldfoot and Emmy McDormand got caught having a go by Filch in the second floor mop closet, and also there have been sausages for breakfast for the past week and a half, and sometimes supper too, and everyone seems to be fairly convinced that one of the house elves has caught an awful head cold, and so doomed the school to endless bangers.   
  
But at the height of its importance, it is a sunny, crystalline morning; it has reached the rank of rumor and whisper. Ice clawing up from the iron of the stained-glass windows in the Great Hall and a porcelain sky arcing through the ceiling and the air smelling like sugared toast and dark marmalade, hot tea and cream, and nothing like mourning. It is just that way, thinks Remus. It is just that way that it is when no one seems to know whose responsibility it is to move first, and so everything hangs happily in the general shuffle and the ugly sweetness of that space: no definition, no direction and certainly no obligation.   
  
He shuffles his papers, he turns a page, and scratches a few lines with his quill, and listens to the low hum and clink of breakfast, and Sirius hunkers down beside him eventually, disheveled and still smelling like sleep – just that way that it is, usually. Except that they have Not Really Fought Yet, apparently, and Sirius does not wake up early; except that he does, now.   
  
“Shocking,” he murmurs. “Before seven, even.”   
  
“Mmh,” says Sirius, pulling Remus’s plate of forgotten eggs and toast into his lap, half a pastry in his mouth already. “Couldn’t sleep. Rotten luck.”   
  
“Your lying face is what’s rotten,” he says. “What’s it you want, then?”   
  
Sirius grins; he slaps the Map down onto the table with his open palm, fork in his other fist, jam on his chin.  “There’s another. Your brilliant fluke got us into that passageway behind the Aphrodite, last time, right, well, there’s another.  I swear, there’s a hollow underneath Mordred’s right leg – Mordred in the - ”   
  
“I know – the stairwell.  Look. Only if I’ve finished this first,” he says, rubbing ink between his fingers because Sirius has stolen his napkin, too.   
  
“What, Potions essay?  Slugface’ll cut you slack, eh?  Christ, sausages again.  _Again_.”   
  
“It’s not a bloody free ride,” he mutters.  “Sorry, Professor, it’ll be another day or two on account of this furry little problem I’ve got.”   
  
“So  _sunny_  this morning,  _aren’t_  we,” Sirius mutters, shoving the plate back onto the table, against Remus’s elbow.   
  
Remus shrugs one shoulder, as if he’s got a twitch, a niggling itch to shake off.   
  
Sirius jostles his elbow. “I’ll beat it out of you with my hard and manly fists, you know,” he mutters.  “Even before a cuppa.”   
  
Remus snorts. “Leave off.”   
  
“Oi, c’mon,” says Sirius, and there is that teeter in his voice: the quirkcrack bubbling underneath his words that says I COULD BE YELLING AT YOU RIGHT NOW YOU KNOW YOU KNOW JUST BECAUSE I NEVER DID BEFORE DOESN’T MEAN WE CAN’T HAVE IT OUT RIGHT HERE AMONGST THE SAUSAGES.   
  
Remus clenches his teeth and spends three seconds crossing a ‘t’.   
  
“Lupin,” says Sirius.  JUST BECAUSE WE HAVEN’T REALLY FOUGHT YET DOESN’T MEAN I CAN’T TAKE YOU NOW I WILL TAKE YOU ON AND WIN, says the pucker of the ‘p’ sound against his lips.   
  
“Well,” he says. “Well, look. Look, it’s not as if you haven’t heard,” he glances at him, finally.   
  
Sirius shrugs as he reaches for the teapot, but his eyes flicker to the left, briefly, under his lashes. The Hufflepuff table is mostly empty, mostly quiet, mostly like it always has been in the early morning in the winter.   
  
“So?” says Sirius, finally, dropping four cubes of sugar into his mug.   
  
“So?  It’s sad,  _so_.  He was just.”   
  
“It  _happens_.”   
  
“You,” says Remus, operating on the thick-tongued edge of disbelief, only.  “ _You_.”   
  
“ _You_  have jam on your nose,” says Sirius, blowing steam at Remus over the rim of his teacup.  “C’mon, I’ll write it for you, all right? A little walk-about’ll do you good, you’re all pale and rangy and ra _ther_ , aren't you.”   
  
“Hazard of association with present company,” he says, wit on that sharp and hapless drive of preservation, and Sirius laughs and loops his own scarf around Remus’s neck and that, thinks Remus, that,  _this_  is why I will never be a sour person, because I am weak in the face of stupid pointless compassion and people who eat your eggs for breakfast, and jealous of everyone who can just say, so.   
  
“Poppy _cock_ ,” says Sirius, stuffing a crumpet in his pocket and tugging Remus to standing by the scruff of his collar.   
  
“You instill in me a great and burgeoning interest in real violence,” says Remus. And it is because it is not a lie (said only to be droll) that his stomach does a gibbering flip down into his thighs, when Sirius stuffs his personal space full of nervous energy.   
  
“ _Smashing_ ,” says Sirius.  “Lovely.  Now shut the hell up.”   
  
Remus tries to roll his neck in a way that gets him dislodged out from under Sirius’s grip, but only manages to get himself tangled between the straps of his bookbag and the loop of the scarf, and Sirius laughs when he trips over his own ankles and collides into Sirius’s bony hip.  The sound ricochets, it is a full  _noise_ , a storm of heat in the winter.   
  
“Stop it,” Remus murmurs, untangling himself (attempting, anyway, but Sirius’s bony hip is bony, which is obvious, and warm, which is familiar and terrifying).   
  
“Oh, stop it yourself,” Sirius snaps.  “It’s not a bloody funeral.”   
  
“Isn’t it?” says Remus.  “I was rather under the impression that someone had actually – ”   
  
“What’re you writing on, then?” Sirius rummages in Remus’s bookbag, unceremoniously.   
  
“ _Don’t_.  Don’t.  I’ll just finish it later.”  He bites at a nail and squints into the dusty sun patches of the corridor, feeling a strange bruise blooming on his skin, or just under it, and it’s only strange because he can’t quite seem to place where it started, or where it is now.   
  
“Man of my word, Moony,” grins Sirius, and Remus earns another nudge of a bony hip, another bruise that spreads up into his jugular and makes his teeth ache.   
  
“Aren’t,” he mumbles, digging deep for banter, levity, and something else to implant in his voice besides judgment and self-righteousness; he finds it more hopeless than usual.   
  
Sirius pauses, quill held between his teeth, wrist deep in Remus’s bookbag, and Remus glances over to see Sirius looking at him with awful, black, narrowed eyes.  I am suddenly a problem again, thinks Remus. I’d been pegged for a while, and now, now I’m a challenge to be conquered, aren’t I, because your face is  _like that_  and that’s what that means.   
  
“You really - ” says Sirius, and his brow relaxes, slowly, the gentle genius of a quick revelation.   
  
Remus glares.  It’s a horrible thing, this hot and boiling mess inside him when Sirius does things like that, says things like this, to shame him for being simply  _how he is_ , and it’s mostly that it never makes any sense stacked up to everything else: to the sacrifice and adventure and compassion and the way he seems absolutely  _ill_  some nights until he’s sure that Remus’s new scars aren’t all that painful, that he’s had enough to eat, that he’s warm enough, that the blankets don’t slip off the hospital bed.  Oh, I know, thinks Remus, and shoves his fists in his pockets.  I know and I just  _hate_  you for it.   
  
“What?” Sirius says.   
  
“Forget it,” says Remus, and is never sure who comes out the winner, between the two of them, anymore.   
  
“ _You_  didn’t know him,” protests Sirius.  “Lupin.”   
  
“ _Fine_. Fine. It’s fine.”   
  
“Moony,” he says.   
  
“Sorry,” says Remus.  “Sorry, forget it, I don’t care.”   
  
“Augh,” Sirius grins with his teeth; there is the hard, threatening snick in his smile, a swift and dismissive sign of his thin patience for Other People’s suffering.  He grips the crook of Remus’s neck with one big hand, cold and clammy palm tight under Remus’s scarf, fingers on Remus’s collarbone, thumb on the highest knobby bump of Remus’s spine. “Pathetic. C’mon, you sorry bloke.”   
  
Remus wants so badly to squirm, it tightens at the very last vertebrae, and makes his gut q _uiver_. “Leave off, I’ve said it’s - ”   
  
“ _I’d_ notice,” says Sirius, thumb bumping against Remus’s neck, rough and fumbling for skin. “Christ.”   
  
“What,” he says, ache like a rash spreading through his blood and up into his lungs. “I didn’t – “   
  
“Oh, shut it,” says Sirius, mouth a tight, red-bitten line until he laughs, once. “If you  _died_. Christ. You know.”   
  
Remus’s mouth quirks, but he knows, it’s a half-second too late on the upbeat, he knows, which means Sirius will have seen it all, and there we go, he thinks, there we go, another thing stripped away, and I’m so awfully  _happy_  to give it up, aren’t I.   
  
“I’m not dying,” he says, asserting, and looks away.   
  
“Not yet.”   
  
“Cheeky.”   
  
“Cheeky yourself,” Sirius squeezes Remus’s nape, once, hard. “Forget it, all right? We’d all come to your funeral and be very awfully morbid and soppy, and I’d – I’d. Write a poem, a sonnet, right? It’d all be very pretty and iambic and appropriately acknowledged, and I’d punch anyone who laughed for at least three months.”   
  
“Three months,” says Remus, and shifts his weight a halfstep forward.   
  
“Obligatory mourning period.”   
  
“Thanks awfully.”   
  
“Well, it’s only right,” says Sirius, and his hand goes still on Remus’s collar.  “The right thing to do, when.”   
  
It is an unchangeable mistake, thinks Remus, but he looks at him.  It is the dusty sun patches in the corridor, he thinks, the cold in the corners of the stones and the sun in the dust and I have heat-stroke in the middle of winter, indoors, and my skin is crawling because my jumper is full of moth eggs or bad wool because this is an entirely different animal, with red cheeks and wet eyes and a flurried, helpless line on his lips and  _hand_  on my  _neck_ , thinks Remus, oh Christ, I’ve said so much, and now.  I didn’t forgive  _this_  face, he thinks.   
  
“When,” says Sirius. “Well.”   
  
I don’t trust you, thinks Remus.  Remember.   
  
“Forget the essay, then,” he says, and shrugs his shoulders like he feels a chill. “Fair change for a eulogy, all right?”   
  
“Er,” says Sirius, hand hovering where Remus has dislodged it. “No, that’s not – I.” He looks as though he’s been wedged into a tight and prickly corner, and Remus’s stomach crinkles, unpleasantly.   
  
“Library,” he says, and stands. “I’ll be. Library, you know. See you at half-six, then?”   
  
“Right,” says Sirius, a small dark hollow between his teeth, where his lips don’t quite close, where his tongue wets. “Yeah.”   
  
He hands Remus the map.  It is folded tight and neat; it is warm with the press of both their hands.   
  
  

\--  


  
  
_He will never ask why. The reasons are never right, he thinks, and he has never trusted that good intentions are actually, actually, wholly innocent, mostly because they are always suffixed by the worst mistake of someone’s life_.   
  
_I, says Sirius. Only I -_  
  
_I know, he says, because he doesn’t want to._    
  
 

\--

  
  
Sirius is on the floor of the common room, by the fire, with his back against the ottoman, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up, with bare feet, which means a variety of things, but mostly that he is sleepy, and comfortable, and situated himself that way at two in the morning in order to be perfectly alone, should anyone encounter it.   
  
“My. Where were  _you_?” says Sirius, and grins, firelight catching on his lips.   
  
Remus thinks about just turning around and going out the portrait-hole the way he came in, since he hasn’t even started to take off his scarf, or his jacket, and he’d rather take his chances in the wilds of the Witching Hour than with  _this_.   
  
“Could ask you,” he says. “You never even made it to the library.”   
  
Sirius snorts. “And you’d expect me?”   
  
I have no idea, thinks Remus.  Should I.   
  
“Where’s James?” he says, instead.   
  
“Who knows,” says Sirius, with a disconcerting amount of absolute detachment, which means, Evans.   
  
“Ah,” says Remus, and tugs at the loop of his scarf with two fingers. “Peter’s – ”   
  
Sirius rolls his eyes and laces his fingers together over his knees. “You honestly weren’t holed up there all night, were you?”  
  
“I told you - ” says Remus.   
  
Sirius swivels, eying him halfway over his shoulder, with his hair tucked behind his ears and shadows in his jaw and cheekbones.   
  
“You were busy,” says Remus.  He had the map, after all.  He had been working on it.  He wasn’t checking it  _for_  that, only that it was there, much like it always was, only this time it was rather Sirius Black and Mary Mclaren and Greenhouse Four.  He had thought, strangely, at that point, at midnight, about how to go about erasing something living, and adaptable and indelible.  Before, of course, he realized that this shining, new jealousy and the residual, angry guilt had managed to combine in his gut to give him nausea so powerful he could  _feel_  a thick layer of bile on his tongue and teeth.   
  
“I was  _busy_ ,” leers Sirius, quick-tempered and languid, all-in-all.  “Wasn’t I.”   
  
Remus feels a bristle under the hairs of his arms, behind his ears.  “Forget it,” he says, and presses his palm to the back of the armchair; he wants to leave and go to sleep.  He wants to  _leave_ , and his arm stays rigid because even his body is full of betrayal tonight.   
  
“Oi,” says Sirius, twisting fully, elbows propped on the seat.  “You could have - ”   
  
“I said,” he says.  “Just - ”   
  
“Mates come first,” says Sirius.  “You - ”   
  
“It’s nothing,” says Remus.   
  
“You come first,” says Sirius.   
  
“It’s  _nothing_ ,” says Remus.   
  
“Oh, what the hell are you so cross about?” Sirius snaps, jostling a shoulder into the chair.   
  
“Lower your voice,” Remus snaps back, in a whisper.  “It’s two in the morning and you were here - ”   
  
“What,” Sirius glares. “I was here what.”   
  
“ _Waiting_ ,” he says.   
  
“To rub it in you, eh?” Sirius laughs, dark under his tongue.  “Christ, is that what you think? You think I’m still waiting to see if you’ve come ‘round?”   
  
“You,” says Remus. “I’ve said it was - ”   
  
“You’re still all wound up about it!  I told you, I told you then and I meant it then and I’ll say it again, it wasn’t ever about  _tha_ t, it was about you, for Christ’s – for Christ’s sake – I’m not going to grovel for your fucking, fucking  _smile_ , Lupin.  I did it to  _protect_  you.”   
  
“Oh, for.”  He turns.  He turns and leaves.  He turns and leaves to go up the stairs and just go to bed and fumble through another awkward, shaky day of awkward, shaky, tight-roped friendships and he pretends that he can’t hear the footsteps, until Sirius grabs his scarf fringe, and tugs, hard.   
  
“Lupin!”   
  
“Bugger,” he chokes.   
  
Sirius corners him against the railing with one arm and the other hand coiled in his scarf.  He smells like coals and perfume.   
  
“The hell, Lupin,” Sirius growls.  “I wasn’t finished!”   
  
“You’re never finished,” Remus mutters, trying to loosen the wool around his neck, a little.   
  
“I never started!” Sirius snaps.  “Oi, look at me!”   
  
Oh, thinks Remus.  Oh  _no_.   
  
“I think you’re choking me,” he says.   
  
“Ha ha, you don’t get off like that, you filthy bastard,” grinds Sirius.  “I either am or I’m not, your  _brain_  has no fucking say in the matter.  I was.  And you!  You were – we are  _done_  with that shite, I thought.”   
  
Remus bristles, gut like a thick wad of paper and guilt and nerves.   
  
“I – ” he says.   
  
“You said – ”   
  
“I never – ”   
  
“I’ve been – for – I’ve been, haven’t I been – ”   
  
“You haven’t meant a single – ”   
  
“All right! Shut it,” hisses Sirius.  “You mope at me about nobody giving a damn about you and you’re going to  _get_  it, understand? I’ve fucking  _had_  it.”   
  
“I haven’t – ”   
  
“Sweet fucking - ” says Sirius “ - fucking Christ. Fucking  _idiot_. I - ” Sirius grinds it out, leaning in, wrapping the scarf in his fist and  _pulling_.  “I would have  _killed_  for you.”   
  
It shocks his blood cold and his thighs hot.  He thinks, vaguely, that he should punch Sirius in the mouth for that.   
  
“If you say one bloody word that makes it sounds like you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll – “   
  
“You’re raving,” hisses Remus, pressing a fist to Sirius’s chest and getting his fingers tangled in Sirius’s tie.  “Stark raving and you have no  _right_  - ”   
  
“I’d do it again,” growls Sirius, so close Remus feels his stupid, stupid stubble against his own chin.  “Fuck the bloody eulogy,  _that’s_  what I mean.”   
  
“You’ve never meant a word in your life,” Remus snaps, but it only sounds like crackling air: no force or voice, just clumsy lips and teeth clattering in his mouth.   
  
“I  _gave you the map._ I gave you the maptonight, you  _stupid shite_ ,” Sirius hisses, and his thumb is digging painfully into Remus’s jaw.   
  
This is where, Remus thinks, where it gets worse, and he is terrified by how utterly oblivious this raw and bloody shaking anger has boiled over into the happiest moment of his life, has turned to the most singular instance, has found a space to exist, quaking, in the hard and desperate curl of his own fingers around Sirius’s jawline.   
  
“I should be punching you in the mouth,” he says; his brain is reusing his own thoughts.   
  
“Go ahead,” says Sirius, and he has the grip of his fingers spread up into the fringe of hair over Remus’s nape and ear.  “Or maybe you’ll actually do something right for once.”   
  
Remus kisses him because of the economy of the action.   _Noise_  silenced, threat acted, aching quelled, blindness cured, terror stilled, violence satisfied.  
  
  
  
---


	2. English Poetry Is Not Yet Fit To Speak Of Them

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the beginning, the middle, and something of an end.

**PART II**  
**English Poetry Is Not Yet Fit To Speak Of Them**

  
“It wasn’t awful,” says Sirius, after the first time, in the way which is entirely a question, but isn’t. His tongue is oddly heavy, and his thoughts are taking a very long time to wade their way to coherency.   
  
“What,” says Remus, and sounds congested, with half his face still pressed into the blankets. “I – have no idea. I’d have no, er. Idea, really.”   
  
“It wasn’t,” says Sirius, again. “Only you were – you made a face like – ”   
  
“Oh my god,” says Remus. “Be quiet, it’s too dark to see my face  _be quiet_.”   
  
And Sirius feels his stomach crawling down into his thighs again, and it was so  _clearly,_  rightly, dangerous when it happened an hour ago, and now he is lying on a rumpled blanket between Remus’s old school trunk and an never-unpacked box that he knows contains moldy biscuits, because Remus complained about packing them up last year, and his heartbeat is doing very loud, unnatural things in his chest.   
  
“Isn’t quite,” says Sirius, and Remus’s warm, bony body is shifting against his side, and he can feel the sweat on his jaw cool when Remus exhales. “Though I could  _hear_  perfectly, you know, and you - ”   
  
“Oh my god,” says Remus, again, and tries to land a solid punch: all awkward unmovable limbs made numb and slow with _something_ , thinks Sirius, something, and he ends up blindly pushing his open palm into Sirius’s cheek and nose, instead. “Augh.”  
  
Sirius can’t help but laugh, that it is so familiar and so odd, that he is almost able to forget how he is now in possession of the most terrifying memory of his life: you know, he thinks, you know the one you know now, where you looked down and saw his face and his eyes were  _open_ , he thinks, he was  _watching_  you. And when he touched your mouth with his fingers, he thinks, he might have been shaking, might have been as utterly mad as you, or maybe not at all, and you’re really going to have to go this fucking alone, after all.   
  
“Well,” he sighs, sharply, and sets about trying to rediscover if his thighs have feeling in them, yet.   
  
“Wmph,” says Remus.   
  
“Ha-ha-ha,  _so_ ,” he mutters, and fumbles about with his trouser legs, and thoughts of tea, and Remus’s red-bitten mouth. “So, there’s that.”   
  
\--  


  


WHERE ARE YOU, says the letter, in James's reckless scrawl. MY OWL WAS STARVING TO DEATH AT YOUR FLAT FOR 9 HOURS WHERE ARE YOU WHY AREN'T YOU THERE. 

  
_Your owl is intensely stupid,_  replies Sirius.  _Why would I be there._    
  
"It is  _your_  flat," says James, when he Apparates into Remus’s audaciously tiny kitchen, a quarter of an hour later, because, thinks Sirius, that would be exactly when the kettle was boiling, when he'd just be finishing the first side of a cheese toastie, wouldn't it.  
  
"If you fed your own fucking owl yourself, it wouldn't be an issue where I was," says Sirius, and gestures for the kettle to  _please just shut the hell up I heard you the first time._  It squeals twice more, insolently, before settling on a quiet steam.   
  
"Moony about?"   
  
"Gone out," says Sirius. "He's a  _proper job_  and everything."   
  
"Does not!" James grins. "Where now?"   
  
Sirius shrugs, and jiggles the frying pan, a little. The air smells pleasantly like sizzling butter, subtly undercut by whatever doom it is that James has hanging on the tip of his tongue. “Some Muggle shop. Supposes he’s exhausted Diagon and all, what with that.”   
  
“That and all,” James mutters. “Rotten business.”   
  
“Convinced himself he needs the fucking money,” says Sirius. “Don’t know why he’s bothering, with all the bloody hassle it is. And, he’s just pants at lying, by now.”   
  
“Lying to  _us_ ,” grins James. “Poor unsuspecting fools’d be worth a few good Sick Aunties, though, eh?”   
  
“Mm," says Sirius, because he's not sure if he agrees, anymore.   
  
"And, what, he's employed you as full-time flat-watcher?" James leans over his shoulder; Sirius jabs him in the stomach with his elbow before he can reach for the toastie in the pan.   
  
"Off, off! If you want this one, you’ll get your own bloody tea.” (He is glad, because he is only marginally less pants at lying, after all, and every sort of excuse he can think of seems sort of weak and sick-coloured and floppy next to the fact that his own bed is lumpy and cold and usually doesn't have Remus's bare thighs or Remus's mouth or Remus's funny, slightly-frowning sleeping-face in it. That makes a difference, he thinks.)   
  
“Cheers,” James says, peering in the cupboard by Sirius’s head. “Listen, if you’ve got a few?”   
  
Sirius glances at him, and there is that little movement where James pushes the bridge of his specs up his nose with one finger, that makes him want to burn the whole damn sandwich and shove it peevishly into the rubbish bin.   
  
“We – he’s out of Darjeeling,” he says, instead.   
  
“Shite, anyway,” mutters James, rummaging elbow-deep in the cupboard to find a mug. “Can’t even spell it. But listen, honestly, I’ve had another run-in with them.”   
  
Bastard, thinks Sirius. You snuck that in there rather neatly, didn’t you.   
  
“Mm,” he says, instead, and slides the toastie onto a plate.   
  
James shifts, pouring the hot water. James shifts, wrists balancing on the countertop. James shifts, and takes the plate. James shifts, and his shirt makes a soft rustle at the elbows, at the collar, at the place where it bunches at his trousers. James shifts, and looks at him, out of the corner of his eye, and Sirius can still sense it, of course, but it makes his stomach turn, because it is an awful, unsteady mess of Right and Not Right, like trying to cram the moon into the sun’s place, but insisting  _oh no yes I don’t know what you’re on about mate it’s always been like that pip-pip!_    
  
“Was leaving the Ministry,” says James, and there is a curl in his lip, and the steam from the tea clouds his glasses. “Honestly, Malfoy did a right proper job of getting me cornered.”   
  
“Malfoy?” Sirius’s nerves tweak all the way up his spine, and into his joints and eardrums. “Go on.”   
  
“Complete crock, right?” says James, except he isn’t laughing, really. “Except.”   
  
“You’d think the first time you told them off would’ve done it,” mutters Sirius, even though he doesn’t believe it, really.   
  
“S’not what bothers me,” sighs James. He hooks one of the chairs with his ankle, and pulls it closer to sit down again: plate and cup beside him, one ankle propped over his knee, one elbow resting on the table, and Sirius pretends his is very good at not noticing any of this, at all. “The ones from school, they were a rotten lot with no brains - in Quidditch, too, ‘specially Rosier. I’d almost expect everything  _but_  what this sort of thing, you know, it’s almost  _civil_.”   
  
Sirius scoffs. “What, come-and-have-a-cuppa-and-would-you-like-to-be-a-Muggle-murdering-twat? Have we  _men_ tioned how fan _tas_ tic the pay is?”   
  
“Honestly, yeah,” says James, and looks down again, fingers tearing the toastie in half. “Yeah. And. Listen, mate, it was just him. None of that bluster, right. I mean, he was still that bloody peacock with his chest out to  _here_ , honestly, but there wasn’t anybody else. Not a soul. Which means.”   
  
He pauses, licking crumbs from his thumb, and Sirius feels a heavy huff of a sigh building in his throat, tightening up his voice into an unpleasant sort of rasp when he speaks.   
  
“Wasn’t for show, then,” he says, and feels like cursing because he’s positive that Remus took the jacket that had his last pack of Toogle’s Best Tobacco still stuffed in the pocket.   
  
“We should know what’s an empty threat by now, eh?” agrees James. “Only.”   
  
Sirius watches the frown form on James’s mouth – he can pinpoint the moment where a tiny wrinkle pulls at the corner of James’s left eye, and his hair suddenly looks a little thinner, and his skin a little paler, and there is a smudge, on his glasses.   
  
“Fucking hell,” he says.   
  
James laughs into his teacup, and it does sound more like porcelain than his voice should ever sound.   
  
“They want Lily too,” he says. “She hasn’t said anything, mind, but it’s clear.”   
  
“When?”   
  
“Dunno,” says James. “Could have been years ago, honestly, only. If it were, I’ve a feeling the row she had with Snivellus wouldn’t have been kept quiet, much.”   
  
Sirius feels his lip curl, automatically. “Christ. Don’t even. Has he?”   
  
James shakes his head. “Not a greasy speck, not in months. Don’t know where exactly he’s naffed off to this time, but.”   
  
“Couldn’t pay  _me_  to care,” Sirius grunts.   
  
“You’re one to talk,” James grins, suddenly. “Couldn’t give a fuck about you either, could they?”   
  
“Well, fucking why should they?” Sirius snaps, dumping the frying pan into the sink with a little more force than necessary, perhaps. The clatter is satisfying, and it masks whatever noise James makes in response. (The first time, Peter thought he was _jealous_  of James, for Christ’s sake, because he was so furious.)   
  
“Spoke to Dumbledore,” says James, after a pause.   
  
Sirius looks at him over his shoulder; James is twisting the tea-bag string around his index finger. “Yeah?”   
  
“Look,” James sighs, finally, and looks at him straight, with that steadfast little pullback in his shoulder-blades, so his spine is straighter and his shoulders look broader, which is what he started to do after Evans told him slouching made him look like a demented sort of chimpanzee (this was, of course, after it all Started To Matter). “Look, don’t tell Lily, all right, not until my say so? Normally it wouldn’t be a – I mean. I’m not trying to keep her locked in the attic, obviously, I just. It’s not quite sorted out, not yet.”   
  
“She’ll pound you when she finds out,” Sirius grins.   
  
James does not smile. “Better that,” he says.   
  
"Hell," Sirius says again, but he says it to himself, to the frying pan under the water and the insolent kettle and the kitchen that isn't really his, but is, anyway, since it seems to know him pretty well by now.   
  
“Er,” says Remus, from the kitchen doorway, a newspaper and a brown paper bag tucked into the crook of his arm. “Hullo. And you’ve both just come to make me tea, have you?”   
  
James hooks his thumb at Sirius. “The irresistible siren song of butter, cheese and bread.”   
  
“He burned up the drapes once, with those things,” Remus sighs, and shifts the bag in his arms.   
  
“If those are groceries,” says Sirius. “I’m going to  _hex_  you, I’ve just gone.”   
  
“Er,” says Remus. “Darjeeling, mostly. We were out of.”   
  
“ _Excellent_ ,” says James, rising. “S’my cue, I believe, as I’ve just exhausted your supply of Earl Grey as well, and I know not to incur the wrath of Lupin, most proper of Englishmen.”   
  
"So glad you've noticed." Remus smiles, and Sirius can only seem to notice the slight pool of sweat just below his jaw.   
  
"We've a pub date on Saturday, don't forget," James says, rising, hand to Remus's shoulder in passing.   
  
"Oi, full moon before then," Sirius mutters. He's only planned it this way for two months, now. He's only been waiting to be the one to make sure everything is all right, still, again, after all. "I'm the only one with a calendar?"   
  
"All he bloody thinks about," James rolls his eyes, and Disapparates.   
  
"That's my calendar," says Remus, handing the bag off to Sirius, reaching automatically for the teakettle, which always liked him better, anyway. "By the way."   
  
"Mm, yeah,  _do_  just carry on as if you don't appreciate my fine and thoughtful organization of your life."   
  
Remus smiles, a little; his profile is vaguely blurred, his eyes and jawline and mess of hair all slightly out-of-focus. "The red ink is hard to miss, ta."   
  
"Sort of the general idea," says Sirius, and takes his wrist (because he wants to touch him, because he has been accused of worse, after all, because if he doesn't, sometimes he thinks Remus will forget that there is supposed to be a significant difference between  _Then_  and  _Now_.) "You'd be caught mid-step in the middle of Diagon otherwise, wouldn't you: 'Bollocks, do carry on without me, must turn into a slavering beast of darkness for a bit, Cheerio!'"   
  
Remus glances at him, glances at his wrist in the circle of Sirius's fingers. When he starts to smile, Sirius curls his other hand in the rumpled fold of Remus's collar, and leans across the counter and the sink and the newly-steaming kettle, and kisses him on the mouth. He knows that, eventually, if he lets his forehead rest on the slight dip of Remus's temple, if he takes Remus's bottom lip between his teeth, if he runs his thumb up into the soft and oddly put-together joint of Remus's elbow and maybe if he pulls Remus onto his lap with his palms high on the back of Remus's thighs, Remus will close his eyes, eventually. He knows that now, if he just presses his mouth to Remus's in the tiny space of the kitchen, across the counter and the sink and all that and the etcetera, with three points of pressure on their skin, he will feel the rasp of Remus's eyelashes against his cheekbones, where Remus will be watching how they continue to fumble through it, from under half-closed, analytical lids.   
  
"Er," says Remus, and turns his head. "Everything all right?"   
  
"What?" he mutters, nose pressed into Remus's temple.   
  
"With James," says Remus. "Is everything.”   
  
"Nothing. No, it's fine. Why?" Sirius mumbles, because his mouth is against Remus's hair, and it's fuzzy on his lips, and he knows it's the best way to not have to answer.   
  
Remus shrugs, and tugs himself away, gently. "Didn't finish his - " he gestures, at the table with a point of his chin.   
  
Sirius rolls his eyes. "Paranoid, aren't you?" he grins, and tries to hook his fingers into the front-right pocket of Remus's trousers.   
  
Remus glances at him, narrowly. "I've been gone six hours," he says, quiet, and has that little shift in his weight like he's not sure which way would be the faster escape or the best vantage point, and he just has to think about it for just a little longer.   
  
"I know," he says, and curls his fingers so his knuckles press against Remus's hipbone.   
  
"I mean, you saw me six hours ago."   
  
"I  _know_ ," says Sirius again, and leans back against the counter so Remus has something sturdy to fall against when he finally loses patience and hooks an ankle against the back of Remus's calf, to trip him into a kiss or into his hands or his hips (which will be soon, he thinks).   
  
“When was the last time you were even in your own flat?” asks Remus, reaching around him for the newly-bought tin of tea, cupping it in his palm.    
  
“I hate my flat,” he says.  “Everyone hates my flat, it’s awful, it’s an  _asylum_  of hatred, I don’t even know why people ask me that.”  
  
“Oh, only because you pay rent on it,” Remus rolls his eyes, holding the tea tin in front of his chest with both hands, as if it were emitting low heat, or subtle protection.  “The usual expectations, do forgive us.”    
  
“Shut it,” he shuffles a foot forward, knocking it against Remus’s ankle.  “It’s no one’s business anyway, where that ill-gotten gain goes.  All right?”  
  
“You know,” says Remus.  “It’s not that I.  I don’t  _mind_.”  
  
“You’d better not,” he says.  And he plucks the tin from Remus’s hands, when he kisses him.   
  
"Unbelievable," mutters Remus, against his mouth.   
  
But because there is colour in his cheeks, and his has his shirt sleeves rolled up to just above the elbow, so Sirius can see his freckles and odd, knobby wrists, and he sometimes has this incredulous sort of smile (after he raises his voice, after Sirius manages to get him sort of drunk and rolls him around on the bedroom floor, for a while, after Sirius thinks enough of him, enough to leave him a note saying  _DON'T GO ANYWHERE I'LL BE RIGHT BACK DON'T MOVE SO HELP ME MERLIN I WILL HEX YOU IF YOU MOVE_ , enough to kiss him on the stairwell or in the kitchen, well, thinks Sirius, of course, why wouldn't I, and  _no_ , he thinks,  _it's not, at all_.   
  
  

\--

  


  
The house is quiet. Mother is in Wales to visit her aunt, and Father met him at the Station. He was wearing the cufflinks Regulus got him for Christmas last year, and all Regulus could think of was that it was odd: he hadn't seen Sirius on the train, not once, at all. He looked back through the steam before they left, with Father's big hand on his shoulder, and saw nothing but nothing at all.   
  
The house is quiet, and he finds Kreacher at the top of the stairs.   
  
"Hello Kreacher," he says.   
  
"Master Regulus has grown taller again," says Kreacher.   
  
He touches the top of his own head. "Have I?" he says.   
  
"Old Kreacher heard the Mistress say," says Kreacher, his tiny, leather-thick fingers wrapped around the banister spools, his big eyes like heavy ink. "Kreacher heard her say to Mistress Lestrange that she was very proud. That Master Regulus did very well in his exams this year. That Master Regulus did very well, this year."   
  
He sits, on the top step, and presses his palms flat to his knees, and Kreacher stands by his shoulder.   
  
"Oh," he says, again.   
  
"Thank you, Kreacher," he says.   
  
And he wonders,  _have I._

\--

  


  
There are clouds rolling over the sunset; the wind higher than the rooftops is at roaring broil, sweeping the sky out to the west, a great purple-bruised blanket over their heads. Sirius clutches at the concrete under his fingers, his legs swinging out over the ledge of the roof, and the air is eerily gentle around them, when he looks up and imagines just how fast the world is turning above them.   
  
"Don't fall," Remus whispers, tilting his head back so Sirius can feel the soft curls on his bare, bent elbow.   
  
"I  _can_  fly, y'know," Sirius mutters, glancing down at the way Remus's head is tipped back, drunk and glossy-pink cheeks just showing from under his hair, his back to the ledge, knees drawn up with a patch of skin poking through a hole in his trousers. He is holding the last bottle of beer in sleepy fingers, hooking just-so around the slender neck, and Sirius's eyes follow the rub of Remus's thumb over the wet rim.   
  
"Not without a great deal of help from machinery or magic," says Remus, and grins up at him. "I should point out."   
  
"Gimme that," Sirius glares, and swipes the bottle. "So drunk you're getting shirty."   
  
"S'mine," protests Remus, twisting, knuckles pressed to Sirius's thigh.   
  
" _I_  bought it."   
  
" _For_  me. You remember?"   
  
"Yesterday," says Sirius. "Today, every man for himself. All bets off!"   
  
"So generous," Remus murmurs, letting his head tip back to rest on the ledge, nose brushing Sirius's thigh. "Give it over." His fingers reach and curl over Sirius's hip, and the simple tuck of his thumb in the belt loop makes Sirius's throat go thick and dry, a sharp sizzle of heat curling all the way from the backs of his knees to his belly. There is a breeze on the back of his neck, it ruffles his hair, cools his sweat; Remus closes his eyes. He's felt it too, thinks Sirius.   
  
"Give," Remus mumbles again.   
  
Sirius presses a pad of his thumb to Remus's bottom lip, instead. "Lupin," he says.   
  
"Not now," Remus grins, lashes still heavy and dark over his cheekbones, dry mouth sliding over Sirius's thumb. "'m still tired out."   
  
"Tease."   
  
Remus laughs, and hoists himself up to his knees with a grunt, twisting to let his elbows rest on the ledge, nabbing the almost-empty bottle from Sirius's hands. "Why ruin the moment, hm?" he drinks, flushed.   
  
"Mm,  _ruination_ ," Sirius grins, soppy with the memory of Remus's bare thighs under his mouth.   
  
Remus rolls his eyes, head tilted away from the wind, from Sirius's body. "Forget it," he mumbles. "Incorrigible."   
  
"And you're a prude," Sirius says to the sky, legs swinging. "Your point?"   
  
"Oh, finish it," Remus mutters, thrusting the bottle into Sirius's hands again, hauling himself up to sit with his back to the horizon, feet firmly planted on the gravel of the rooftop. "You're not nearly drunk enough if you're still insulting me."   
  
"Well, if I can't fuck you – "   
  
Remus punches him in the arm.   
  
"What?" Sirius yelps, laughing, teetering with the wind, and Remus hooks two fingers in Sirius's sleeve to pull him back.   
  
"Ridiculous," he mutters, eyes averted.   
  
"Oh, because it's such a novelty by this point," Sirius tips the bottle back to his lips, leaning into Remus's knuckles. "Christ, you think with how hard I worked for it in the beginning you'd cut me some slack by now."   
  
"And more charming by the second," Remus sighs; Sirius feels his body shift and resettle, shoulders rolling back like he does in the morning after the Moon, a stretch and shedding of the skin, blood fresh and cuts shining like silver and rubies on the surface of his flesh.   
  
Sirius sneers in frustration. "Right, c'mere," he says, resolute, bottle forgotten on the ledge, rim whistling in the wind, and he leans over to bury his nose in the bared crook of Remus's neck. "You shut the fuck up, right now," he grins. "With all of this – this – "   
  
"This what," Remus whispers, breathing still, jaw brushing Sirius's temple.   
  
"We don't have  _time_  for this," says Sirius.   
  
"What?"   
  
"The world could end tomorrow."   
  
Remus laughs; the wind catches it and makes it tight. "So dramatic."   
  
Sirius pinches his thigh, mouth sliding against the bunched tendons of Remus's shoulder. "It could. It could, and you’d be fucking sorry you ever said no, wouldn’t you.”   
  
"I won't – " says Remus, eyes half-closed. "I'm not going to – you know that - "   
  
"I don't – why the hell should I force it out of you?"   
  
"You stupid – " Remus whispers. "You stupid bastard."   
  
"Bastard yourself," says Sirius. The sounds, he realizes, coming from his own throat, are vaguely terrifying when they are genuine: dark and sad and edging on a mute desperation. "You. You're  _fantastic_. All right?"   
  
And Remus sighs, a little, like the world is awfully hard on him. "So, it's something you do a lot now, is it?"   
  
"What – that," says Sirius, and bumps his nose on Remus's jaw.   
  
"Saying things," says Remus, and tips a knuckle against Sirius's chin, and Sirius is acutely aware of how much smaller Remus is when his voice is even, his eyes are steady, and he's absolutely petrified. "Because no one else will say them?"   
  
"Drunk," Sirius whispers, and finds his mouth (it's easy because of Remus's fingers, a bridge in the impending dark), close enough to  _almost_. "I'm drunk, not – "   
  
"Oh, just – " Remus whispers, and Sirius tastes the command on his own tongue, when he finally kisses him.   
  
And when the world goes dark outside, they retreat down to the warmth of Remus’s flat, with the red teakettle, the flimsy curtains and mice in the walls and the threadbare couch and the mattress on the floor in lieu of a bed. And when Sirius is splaying Remus's bare body open with his hands, three wet fingers inside and both of them gasping for air and every muscle straining for that glossy and quaking second, Sirius wants to speak – say,  _oh_ , if, if you, oh beautiful – and Remus presses two shaking fingers to his mouth, eyes desperate for silence when they come.   
 

  


\--

  


  
Sirius thinks he should have known better than to think anything now would be the same as it was before, ever. Even if they were still together, even if they were still generally, mostly, happy, and young, and even if they were still crowding into the Potters’ summer house in Brighton, trying to fill up the bright, dusty kitchen and the paisley bedrooms and the dark, hot attic and the pine-wood porch and the coves and stretches of sand along the water with bodies and voices not big enough to fill in the things that were missing. He thinks he should have been more alert, shouldn’t have spent weeks purposefully drowning himself in sunshine and choking on sand and blue skies and the odd, triangle-shaped tan that Remus developed at the back of his neck, after the initial burn peeled away. (That was new, he thinks, it doesn’t count. You should have known that too.)   
  
He should have known, he thinks, that just because they had been oblivious to how life was inclined to make them grow older, grow taller, fight less, fight more, it didn’t mean they were ever safe from it.   
  
Because in the late, late afternoon, on the beach, James says,  _Er listen up for a bit won’t you mates_ , and Sirius feels the hot peak of wariness shoot up his spine, and he is almost furious.   
  
Remus makes a non-committal sound from the picnic blanket, from underneath the oversized pinkstraw sunhat they found underneath some netting in the Potter’s overturned rowboat. (Mr Potter had turned it over with Sirius’s help last summer, before the funeral, before they died, before all that, you know, to help it dry and keep the wood and paint from cracking when everyone had left for London again, when autumn and winter came into Brighton. James gave Sirius the hat, silently, when he found it. Sirius wore it for six days, and then decided Remus’s red and peeling nose was just  _painful_  to look at, and passed it on.)   
 

“Oi, I mean it,” says James, and Sirius is nauseated by the sound. “Lupin.”   
  
“He’s awake,” says Sirius, scratching at the underside of his calf where the sun and sand have crusted. He squints into the sky. He doesn’t want to have to look at anyone, because they are suddenly all very old now and Evans is swimming in the ocean far out in front of them, her white arms and ankles dipping in and out of the dark like the flashing bellies of jumping fish.   
  
“Wasn’t,” Remus murmurs, and does not remove the hat. “This had better be important.”   
  
“Ugh, Sirius,” Peter mumbles, from beside him, as he lifts himself up onto his elbows. “You still have that  _seaweed_  in your hair.”   
  
“It’s not  _seaweed_ , I only found it in your mum’s  _fanny_  last night, didn’t I?” Sirius fishes it out and flicks it at Peter’s sunburnt thigh.  
  
Peter makes a noise like a strangled bull, and tries to get as much sand in Sirius’s eyes as possible before James rips the slimy-crust of seaweed off his leg and holds it up between them like a weapon, black and rattling and wriggling with dried seawater.   
  
“Right,” he says sharply. “The next bloke to make a move that  _isn’t_  raptly listening what I’m about to say gets to  _eat_  this for supper, courtesy of my  _raging fists_.”   
  
“Delightful,” murmurs Remus, and lifts the brim of the sunhat with his wrist.   
  
“Just try it,” Sirius snaps, and focuses instead, hazily, on the way Remus’s belly has fewer scars and more freckles than his back.   
  
“Fuck off, Black, I mean it,” says James, quietly.   
  
“This is one of those  _things_ ,” says Peter, which Sirius knows means that James has two red spots on his cheeks and his neck flushes and he pushes his specs up onto his nose with his index finger. Which means that James looks guilty. “Oh, no.”   
  
“Er,” says James, and adjusts his glasses again. “Yes.”   
  
“It’s impossible for it to be that bad,” Remus says, quietly, with his pale, chapped lips and his stupid, bleary, salt-water, sun-squinted, heavy-lidded eyes, and Sirius wants to punch him, or just roll him under the dock again where tiny bird-bones and beach lichen and clam shells snapped under their palms and thighs, and Remus’s hair was wet, and curling on the edges, and Sirius tasted salt there when he panted against the curve of Remus’s ear.   
  
“I,” says James. “Don’t know.”   
  
“If you’ve killed someone,” Peter hisses. “That’s definitely  _bad_.”   
  
Sirius barks a laugh, and hopes they could be so lucky.   
  
“Ta, Pete,” James grinds out. “I’ll keep that in mind for when you wankers all up and  _abandon_  me for good, since you seem to be getting some awfully good practice at it right  _now_.” The seaweed shakes once, limply, and drips something cold and vomit-coloured onto the top of Sirius’s foot.   
  
Sirius wipes at it, half-heartedly, and looks out at the ocean, at the frothy edge of the beach, at the dimming sky and the clouds and the fat, heavy sun. He looks at the water, and sees her body shaped and hidden by the tide and mostly the momentum of her own power and he thinks, well. Maybe that’s not so unfamiliar. After all.   
  
“If it’s - ” he says, and stops. Sirius decides he’ll wait for him, first, and hopes, vaguely, that someone will notice his nobility and self-sacrifice and compassion, later, he thinks, when this isn’t such a thing, anymore.   
  
“Look, it’s just,” says James. “It’s not that I’m scared of  _it_. I want it. It’s no question. No bloody question. It’s just,” he says. “I know what to  _do_.  _Everyone_  knows what to do.”   
  
I understand that, thinks Sirius. We always understood that. You haven’t changed at all, have you.   
  
And then – “I just don’t know how to  _ask_  her.”   
  
“Oh,” says Remus, suddenly. “Wait - ”   
  
“Really?” Peter blinks. “You mean, you’re. Are you going to  _today_?”   
  
James looks Sirius dead on, mouth twisted a little, that half-apology of a face that always meant he didn’t really feel very sorry at all, because he’d come out on top or won all the points himself or saved the day or drank the most whiskey and thrown up the least or took the best grades, or, as they said, gotten the girl.   
  
“I could,” says James. “Technically.”   
  
“Technically,” repeats Remus, shifting to look over Sirius’s bent knees. “Technically what?”   
  
“Technically,” says James, and pulls the little black box from his pocket, gingerly. He puts it on the blanket, between his hips and Sirius’s ankles and they all stare at it, warily, and Sirius thinks it might be better if it  _did_  explode.   
  
“Hell,” says Peter, blinking. “Have you really been hiding that down the front of your trunks all day?”   
  
“That is so far from important,” James groans, sitting back on his heels, seaweed flopping in his fist, against his knee. “Look. _Look_. What the hell am I doing with that?”   
  
Sirius snorts, and squints at the sun.   
  
“Oh, shut it,” James mutters, sharply. “If I have to think about this for one day longer I’m going to give up the ghost and just off myself, all right? So just. Just be  _smart_  fucking blokes, for once, you know? I must’ve hired you for  _something_ , didn’t I?”   
  
“Er,” says Peter.   
  
“Prongs,” Remus sighs, and lays back again, a hand over his eyes. He is smiling.   
  
James makes a wretched noise. “I tried to. I even did the – that thing, the mirror thing. I fucking stood in front of the mirror and _practiced_. I practiced talking.  _Talking_. I couldn’t do it – couldn’t even ask myself,  _myself_ , and the mirror told me it didn’t even have the heart to laugh. I was that, that awful. What the  _hell_.”   
  
But it’s been so brilliant, thinks Sirius, because I could be full of sun and sand and salt water just the way I was before all of these awful Older People things started to happen to me and to us, he thinks. We were almost perfect, again, he thinks, except that Wormtail isn’t quite so fat anymore. And those other things, he thinks, the ones you can’t ignore. Why would you do this, he wants to snap. Why would you ruin this for everyone?   
  
“You just ask her,” he says. “Don’t you?”   
  
James rolls his eyes. “Unhelpful, prick.”   
  
Sirius narrows his eyes. “It’s what  _I_  would do,” he snaps. “You  _asked_.”   
  
“And your running tally of women-who-are-going-to-marry-you speaks so highly of your expertise,” James bites, sharper than it was probably meant, thinks Sirius, since he has no idea, really, and is so deep into the stewing panic of his own head, thinks Sirius, that at this point he might actually vomit.   
  
“He’s right,” says Remus, sunhat held between his fingers again, loosely drooping in the sand, sun shielded from his eyes with his forearm. He looks at them from underneath his wrist, and Sirius thinks,  _oh you shut up I’ve never told you properly anyway so what do you know about how much anybody needs you_.   
  
“I mean,” says Remus. “He has a point. Once you get the first word out, it’s only three more until the end, and it sort of gets the idea across enough to distract her until you can think again to say something more, er. Explanatory. Doesn’t it?”   
  
“Well. Yeah. But it’s not very,” James rubs at his forehead, before he realizes his palm is still coated with the remnants of the seaweed, and the grey-green smear runs the length of his nose. “Ugh.  Romantic.”   
  
“What isn’t?” says Lily, shaking clotting, wet sand from her feet, dripping at the edge of the picnic blanket, her footprints a dark trail behind her from the edge of the waves. There is a sharp, thick moment of silence, and James twists where he is sitting, eyes wide. Remus stills, Peter makes a strange and fumbling sound in the back of his throat, and the waves quietly soak up her presence from the sand.   
  
Sirius thinks about the tiny black box sitting next to his ankle, and looks at her, slowly, carefully, and tries to gather together all the things that Lily Evans is and how they might be something that would fit into a container that small, hidden in James’s pocket, or set gently on a picnic blanket on a beach in the end of August. He watches her when she twists her wet hair up into a knot, and the first licks of the sunset paint her lifted cheekbones and her left clavicle and the underside of his elbow and her waist and the curve of her thigh right above her knee, and her ankles. Her skin is pink, her hair is red, and she is wearing a blue plaid swimming costume, with one of the bows missing from her left shoulder strap, and she is smiling and tired from her swim.   
  
And Sirius looks at Remus’s skinny, sandy knees and strange, small body with transmutable bones and skin like some inhuman tissue (thin enough to see though, deep enough to  _ridge_  into the muscles when it heals). He looks at Remus’s pointed chin and bony wrist and the careful stillness of his whole being and he thinks about how tight his chest had been the night he pinned Remus to the stairwell wall and felt as though he had really left his last bit of sanity behind him, for a moment. And he thinks that he wants to be good enough.   
  
I want to be good enough, he thinks, and feels the panic like a scraping, emptying ache, like an echo of the helpless edge in James’s voice.  _For everything you want. Like that_. So, maybe.   
  
“What isn’t romantic?” says Lily again, and she bends down to pick up her folded towel.   
  
“Euh,” says James.   
  
“-- are those  _fish guts_  on your face?” asks Lily, hands stilled over her hips.   
  
“Seaweed!” says Peter, loudly.   
  
_Oh, bugger_ , thinks Sirius.   
  
“Marry me,” says James.   
  
And because she thinks he’s joking, he has to ask her again three more times, and once again, after supper.   
  
 

\--

  


_But he didn’t really ask her_ , says Sirius, later, on the veranda steps, with the stars sparking off the water and the sound of old boat bones creaking in the distance.   
  
"I don’t know. He didn’t really need to?" says Remus, and folds his arms over his knees.   
  
"She didn’t believe him," Sirius says, pointedly.   
  
"She does now," says Remus, and tucks his smile against the inside of his bent elbow.   
  
Sirius turns his head and looks at him. His hair has dried with a matted curl, and a stubborn cowlick by his temple and he still looks utterly silly, most of the time, in his white oxford and his short trousers and his over-present Old Man eyes. He still has sand under his fingernails, and stuck to his bare legs and he scratches at his sunburned shoulder through his shirt. His nose is vaguely crooked and his neck has that long white scar that arcs lazily up behind his ear, into the hair at his nape.   
  
"What," says Remus, lifting his chin above his arms.   
  
"Do you believe me?" he asks.   
  
Remus places one hand, palm down, on the steps between them, and leans over. He pauses, like an odd and overmeasured heartbeat, like the press and yield of a wave, before he pulls at the hem of Sirius's jumper; hooks two fingers in it and gathers it up in his fist. He kisses the side of Sirius’s mouth. And his eyes are only just half-closed.   
  
Strange creature, thinks Sirius.  _You look so harmless, I forget. Sometimes_.   
  

  


\--

  


  
In September, he falls ill for the last time in his life. He wakes with heavy, edgy nerves, one morning, and by the next day he has a headache and a fever, and a cough dreadful-sounding enough to make Slughorn stop him in the halls with a genuine sort of frown, and a genuinely firm palm on his shoulder.   
  
_Here now you're looking awfully rough along the edges aren't you Reg_.   
  
That was a very silly thing to say, thinks Regulus, and: how on earth would you know?   
  
_Here now_ , says Slughorn, again.  _Here now Rodolphus take old Reg here up to see Poppy now won't you there's a good lad._    
  
He's a foreigner to the Hospital Wing, because he's never bruised his knuckles on someone else's face, or been launched sideways through the air by a badly-cast sixth-year spell. He avoids that sort of thing; he avoids doctors, most of his childhood was a sickbed, he thinks, anyway. He has learned not to complain, because when Sirius was still here, he would be silently furious at Regulus's runny nose or red eyes or clammy skin, from across the Great Hall; because now that Sirius is not here, there is no one to be furious at all.   
  
Madam Promfrey does not know him, but she knows where his face is from. She is unamused, and fussy, and she pokes at his throat and temples and ribs.   
  
_Had a boy die,_  she says, in the quiet, with a funny, flat piece of wood pressed firmly against his tongue.  _Had a boy die, you know, not too long ago. Just a plain sort of Muggle flu. Plain sort of thing_.   
  
He nods, with his fingers gripping at the edge of the mattress, because there is a funny, flat piece of wood holding his jaw open, and she presses the back of her wrist to his forehead. And he thinks that is an absolutely  _awful_  thing to say to a sick person.   
  
_Fever_ , she scolds.   
  
She makes him a drink hot tea that smells strongly of lemons and ginger, and wraps him up tightly in the comforters and orders him to sleep, which he does, because the blankets are white, and rather fluffy, and feel entirely unlike what he always believed they would.   
  
_Fever_ , she says.  _Poor old_   _duck_.   
  
It is just so silly, he thinks. What people think they know. It is so unfamiliar, he thinks, that he decides that, later, he will think of it as a dream.

\--

  


  
He is not threatened by his own incompetence, in this case, he thinks. He counts it as another notch under the heading Sirius Black Is Roguishly Handsome And Rebellious And Has Very Little Time For You Common People, and lights another cigarette. He is not at all bothered by the fact that it is still only 9 o'clock in the evening and he's already shut himself in the lavatory, and didn't even bother to turn on the lights. It's a pleasant room, after all, he thinks, and it has all the touches of the vestiges of the Potters that he liked best, after all. The tangible ones, he thinks: the clean surfaces, the lemon-smelling soap bubbles in a clear-lime bottle, the mirror that was generally quite kind, even at six in the morning, the window covered with ivy that peeked out onto the very edge of the vegetable garden, when they had one, the bathtoy broomstick, made of cheery yellow rubber, even the soft pink tiling on the edge of the tub. He likes that there are no flowers or white crepe ribbons or champagne bottles or pretty redheads or Best Mates in Dress Robes or Drunk Muggles. And there are no vows, here, he thinks, except the ones We made. Everything on the outside is muffled and tinkling and faraway and he is completely free to lie fully clothed in the bottom of the dry bathtub, and prop his boots up on the spigot, and smoke, and add one more thing to his list of Afraids, because no one is here to see him do it.   
 

He counts them in a closed fist, tapping a one-two-three against his folded palm:  _here, here, here_  - here you were weak, here you were stupid, here you were helpless and wanted to cry.  _Here_ , one, you did, in the fourth stall from the left in the second-floor toilets, in the early hours of the dawn, with your stomach churning, your knees raw. Night, and a moon, and a row with mouths stretched wide with hatred, slobbering with thoughtlessness, with the worst kinds of truths, and you were petrified, he thinks.  _Coward_ , you could have lost it all. So you vomited by yourself in the dark, and didn't make a sound. And then you washed your face, he thinks. And then, somehow, weeks later, you kissed Remus Lupin on the stairwell.   
  
And here, two, you were so tired. Too stretched thin, he thinks, too pink and red and Black with a beating, too wet and cold with lost London rain to find your own mind, let leave where James could be. You ran, a moment of  _enough_ , of knowing freedom and love and never finding it where one should. And you slept in the doorway of a sandwich shop, and felt the scrape of concrete under your spine and thighs, and fear was so like mindless bravery, he thinks, like the rush of adrenaline, the crackling snap of a wooden bat in the rushing air, shouting delirious, UP LIONS UP, the run of wild dogs and animals, the tingling scrape of the moon on his fur. And fear was like waking up to Remus: in his bed, in the sunshine, and thinking,  _oh_.   
  
So here it is, the third. He counts it out and pauses at the edge of it, at the point of its existence, where his boots are propped up against the rim of the bathtub, and his dress robes are rumpled underneath his back, and the smoke curls up to the ceiling, and he can hear laughter through the door. So they were married, he thinks, and your stupid life still carries on. So everyone is drunk, he thinks, and might not notice you've been missing. So everyone is absolutely soppy with this perfect match and perfect love, and maybe I'll fit right in again tomorrow, after all, he thinks. Or maybe not, he thinks, and finds the sharp point of it, like the heat burning slowly towards his fingertips, and the cool porcelain on his wrist.   
  
Or maybe - he thinks, before the door squeaks open, the saturated sounds and buttery light spilling over each other in their rush to flood the quiet and bounce off the porcelain.   
  
Peter slips in, sideways, and shuts the door behind him again with both palms. When he sighs, and rests his forehead against the wood, Sirius resists the urge to roll his eyes, because he can see the high spots of colour on Peter’s cheeks, and he’s been well aware that the only other people at this bloody stupid thing, tonight, matching him bloody stupid drink for bloody stupid drink have been Remus, who is apparently invincible and could down four barrels of vodka before even considering an ill-placed stumble, if he chose, and Peter, who drinks four glasses of red wine and passes out in the pumpkin patch.   
  
“Oi, occupied,” Sirius mutters, grimly.   
  
“Christ,” Peter starts, exhaling sharply. “Sirius. Give a mate a heart attack, eh?”   
  
“Hunh,” Sirius snorts; he rolls his eyes, and scrapes his boot against the rust pooled faintly at the edge of the drain.   
  
“Oh - ” says Peter, as if he’s just noticed that it might be odd to find someone sitting in a dry tub, fully clothed and steadily smoking through a full pack of Toogle’s Best Tobaccos. “What are you – in here?”   
  
“Just finished with your mum, thanks,” Sirius grins.   
  
“Oi, come off it,” Peter sighs, and Sirius feels the sharp snap of distaste – it doesn’t matter who’s doing the condescending, he thinks. It doesn’t matter if I think they’re beautiful, or hardly think of them at all.   
  
“Christ, well, if I’m so  _boring_ , there are plenty of other fucking loos to wank off in, you miserable git,” he hisses, and plants one boot firmly on the bottom of the tub, raising his upper body.   
  
“Padfoot,” Peter laughs, and raises his hands, palms out, and Sirius relishes the sweet little surge of power, setting everything right again, when Peter’s voice warbles on that happy nervous laugh he has.   
  
“Forget it,” Sirius murmurs, and rests his shoulders against the slope of the tub, again. “Muggles?” he asks.   
  
“ _Muggles,_  “ says Peter, and glances at the mirror, running his hands through his hair. “Did you know, Lily’s, er. Sister, that – she’s. She’s awful.”   
  
“Drunk, too,” Sirius grins, watching Peter stick out his tongue at himself in the mirror.   
  
“Doubt I’d ever be sober, if I had a face like that,” Peter mumbled, and Sirius can’t help it, he laughs, genuinely, and the sound is sharp, and ricochets off the tile, and Peter gives him a grin, over his shoulder.   
  
“They get to you too?” asks Peter, leaning back against the wash basin, gesturing at Sirius’s cigarette.   
  
“Sure,” Sirius shrugs, and tosses Peter his pack. “Don’t tell Evans. She’ll have your hide, and I’ll just blame it all on you.”   
  
“She already smelled it on you, though, didn’t she?” Peter winks, knowingly, and lights his, with a flick of his wand, exhaling to the ceiling. “You’ve been  _banished_ , proper. That’s why you’re sitting in the tub, in the dark, and not dancing with Auntie Muriel.”   
  
“Pete,” Sirius pulls a face. “Eugh.”   
  
“She  _was_  asking after you,” Peter leers.   
  
Sirius resists the urge to throw a bar of soap at him. “Only ‘cause your tiny pecker didn’t satisfy her, mate, sorry.”   
  
Peter rolls his small, bright eyes, and crosses his arms. “Prongs was, though,” he says, and his face is that round portrait of earnestness again, the soft cheeks and trusting smile, and the folded posture and unassuming lift of his eyebrows.   
  
Sirius decides that he doesn’t have an inclination to answer that, after all, and contemplates the rust marks on the showerhead.   
  
“He said, if I found you, to - ” Peter sighs. “I mean, aren’t you being just a bit. Er.”   
  
Sirius looks directly at Peter when he exhales, and thinks he is entitled to feel a little flattered, to still inspire that much of a stutter, after all these years.   
  
“Er, look. It  _was_  a brilliant speech, Padfoot,” says Peter. “Really just - ”   
  
“Fine. Stuff it,” Sirius snaps, hoisting himself up with a small grunt, and grinding his cigarette down the drain.   
  
Peter sighs. “I know he wasn’t just like  _that_ ,” he says. “You know, because of all the toasting. He really. You know.”   
  
Sirius pauses, elbows resting on the rim of the tub, chin on his wrists. It’s not every day, he thinks, that Pettigrew makes a note of Weakness in James, even if soppy, hopeless, over-active tear glands and too much champagne aren’t really a sign of weakness, at all. But it’s not every day, he thinks. At least, he thinks, he’s not picking out the Weakness in  _you_.   
  
“He’d skin you alive to hear you say it,” he says, finally, and looks up.   
  
Peter chuckles. “Our secret,” he says.   
  
“Oh?” Sirius murmurs, lifting himself out of the tub, to standing, brushing some of the last ash from the front of his robes.   
  
“Locked up,” promises Peter, and unloops his arms, leaning back against the basin again. “Only if you promise to take your turn and brave the mad Muggle fires yourself, eh?”   
  
Sirius flips him off when he slips out the door.   
  
He stands in the narrow corridor, which still smells like roses and the lingering edge of talcum powder, and the sour edge of red wine, and the surprised mulch of earth overturned by too many people tromping through the garden and dancing on the place where the wildflower bed used to be.   
  
He puts his hand on the corner of the wall, where a tiny blue stripe of wallpaper is curling at his thumb, and thinks that if James and Lily are going to be married, they should never be married and living in this house. He thinks, who on earth would want to be happy and in love in a place where you turn the corner and suddenly you see her again like she was alive, kneeling to plant yellow-tufted weeds in the ground and calling them beautiful, with her sundress pooled at her ankles, and her dark-and-silver hair tied up in a knot, and the firm way her small fingers pressed his forehead to her shoulder, and let him Not Cry. Or maybe one day you come down in the stairs on morning and it's Da-in-the-kitchen-Sunday, suddenly, and you can smell the eggs and toast and rich tea, and hear the rustle of the  _Prophet_  and the squeak of his slippers on the tiles. Who the hell, he thinks, would fucking want  _that_.   
  
He thinks he has enough money to buy them a flat. One with proper ghosts, he thinks, and feels like he shouldn’t have left his smokes with Peter, after all, before he turns the corner, and sees Remus halfway up the stairs, hand paused on the banister.   
  
“Oh,” says Remus. “There you are. I was just - ”   
  
“I don’t care,” says Sirius; takes the three steps down to put his hand over Remus’s, firmly.   
  
“Er,” says Remus, and his eyes dart around the corner, to the living room, where there is a loud tinkling of glass and the tide of voices and the happy lurch and scratch of gramophone. “Weren’t you just - ”   
  
“Shut up,” says Sirius, and presses his other palm to Remus’s jaw, and kisses his mouth. He feels the moment when Remus’s head tilts, just a little, when Remus’s spine slumps back again, slowly, when Remus’s knuckles touch his chest, between the dip-vee of his collarbones, where his tie-knot would be, if he were wearing one. If he ever wore one, anymore.   
  
He can’t help it – he grins against Remus’s mouth.  _Got you_ , he thinks.  _At least_.   
  
“What?” mumbles Remus.   
  
“I,” says Sirius. “Don’t need to say it. Do I?”   
  
"Er," says Remus. "Probably not." His eyes are narrowed in sly confusion. "Though depending on what it is, you'd say it anyway?"   
  
Sirius looks at his face, at his dark eyes and the lines at the corners of his lips, and the tufts of grey hair on his temples and in the curls behind his ears, and decides he likes a lot of things better, like this, if they are, you know, he thinks, locked up.   
  
"No," he says. "Not if I don't need to."   
  
It is a secret, after all.

  
  
\--

  
  
The house is quiet. Regulus has forgotten that it was never  _not_  quiet before; it's only that it's very quiet now. He will expect to hear Sirius's voice floating up the spiral of a staircase, or the clatters and thuds of his movement down the corridor. He expects to hear the ringing of the bell or the silk-whispers of conversations around half-propped doors. He expects, some days, to hear Mother's humming (the kind she does at tea, on Sundays, with a book and no one watching). He expects to hear the crisp wrinkle-and-release of her skirts, the puff of Father's pipe and the clink of ice in a glass and the metal snick of a spectacles case being tapped shut. He expects to hear someone say,  _Oh. Regulus_? He takes an inventory, some days, because it is cold, and he has been told to ask more questions, be more assertive. He is following advice.   
  
_Places where there are not sounds_ , he writes.   
  
He stands in stocking feet in the foyer in the sickly light of a thin winter, on the marble floor with the arches of ebony over his head. He stands at the end of a long, uncertain corridor, dark with musk and choked with threads of tapestries and groaning flakes of paint. He stands – still, with his arms at his sides and his legs straight and his eyes open, so as not to miss anything – in the middle of the dead garden, the December cornucopia of rotting vines and dirty sky and grey-black spindlethin branches of the willow trees. He stands once in the doorway to Sirius's bedroom, with his hand on the doorknob because he is waiting to be told, something. But everywhere, all it is - in the house – is silent. He can hear three things in all of them, and none of them unique to a corridor, to an empty room, to a garden clawing the icy ground with its nails. He can hear his own breath. He can hear the scrape of his own feet, the rustle of his own clothing in the air. He can hear his own heartbeat, thunderous, sometimes. And he frightens himself by wanting to muffle it dead with his own hands.   
  
Tomorrow it will be Christmas Eve, and they will have a Guest. It is his turn, after all.   
  
_Places where there are sounds_ , he writes, and stops; because he realizes it's not the kind of list anyone would ever want to finish.  
  
---


	3. Nor Is It About Deeds Or Lands, Nor Anything About Glory, Honour, Dominion Or Power, Except War.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the beginning, the middle, and something of an end.

**PART III** ****

**Nor Is It About Deeds Or Lands, Nor Anything About Glory, Honour, Dominion Or Power, Except War.**

  
  
  
In January, Regulus returns from holidays, from London, and he is the strongest he has ever been, and he cannot sleep. He takes to slipping out of the dorms after midnight, because the silence makes his skin itch, and sometimes there are _echos_ in his head, as though there was a voice bound up into the flow of his blood through his veins. He feels where it starts, at the belly of his bare wrist, and the leaden ink branded all the way into his bone. He cannot pinpoint where it ends; sometimes it seems to rattle around in his ribs, pushing at his lungs with broad shoulders, and squeezing at his heart as if it were too crowded in the cavity. Sometimes it spirals up his vertebrae, and plucks at the nerves in his neck, until he has to excuse himself from classes so he can sit in a stall in the boys' toilets on the fourth floor, inside a silencing spell, and scream (with his fist jammed against his mouth) until it goes away.  
  
And sometimes, it curls up in the back of his skull, warm and soft, and kneads sleepily at the spooled-up pieces of his mind. It is not so violent, but it strips him of his ability to rest and dream, and his eyes won't stay closed when there are stray pieces of himself being tugged free and licked back into place again, even with all the care in the world. So he takes to slipping out of his bed, after midnight. So he goes to the Owlery and the Kitchens, but there are Living Things about, and so he goes to the Library instead (slipping through the locked door with a spell he heard Lucius use on a seven-bolt trunk, once, and realized it only needed a little bit of consideration for a seven-bolt door; he uses a thin, low, golden glow of _lumos_ to keep the books from complaining).  
  
He sits in the corner with his knees up, with a book open on his thighs, with his wrists resting on his knees, with his wand held between his fingers. And sometimes he reads. And sometimes he will write letters. Sometimes he will write letters to people he knows, with the intention of sending them, and they are rather boring, and sometimes rather affectionate or kind, or rather deferrent, or rather just words on a page in ink. Sometimes he will write letters to people he knows, but they are people he has never written to before, perhaps, and so doesn't know how to start, perhaps. His brother had a friend with brown hair and an odd, unsymmetrical sort of face, and once he saw them swimming in the Lake, and he thought that he had very skinny arms. He writes to him, and seems to end up asking a lot of questions like _how did you change him_ and _what is it, how did you do that charm with the ribbons for the Yule Ball when I was thirteen, what is it, what is so challenging about you you look so simple sometimes, what is it about you, why does he always seem to want something from you, how do I be wanted_. And, _this probably won't be enough, though, will it_.  
  
And every night he writes a letter without thinking who it will be for, because it is always for Sirius anyway, and he doesn't know how he would ever catalogue that, except wholly by itself.  
  
And when the sun comes up, he puts the books back neatly where they belong. And he flicks his wand, to burn the letters into dust.  
  
  
\--  
  
  
Sirius secretly thinks he may have found a hero in Caradoc Dearborn, but has trouble reconciling it with a man who won't order beer and chips in a pub. A little queer, honestly, but he's made a resolution to avoid the reality of _that_. Dearborn's smart enough, anyway, to cast a silent little spell that makes their conversation sound like a rehash of last night's Muggle football match, and so he ignores the fact that Dearborn scrapes the cheese from his toast and eats the bare bread with a knife and fork, washing it down with red wine. Sirius crunches crisps noisily and licks grease from his fingers and wonders about the rampant endemic issues of confused identity among the young Wizarding aristocracy.  
  
He was an extremely well-bred young man of twenty-eight, or twenty-nine. He had those particularly impeccable manners, thinks Sirius, the kind they beat into you with the blunt end of a silver cake server and cold cabbage for three nights. He had a quick hand in all manner of spells and charms, and soft, watery brown eyes, and he clearly took every opportunity available to dress in ripped denims and black tee-shirts that advertised things like "Sex Pistols" (which Remus said once was an idea that made his thighs twinge unpleasantly). He had never once uttered a swear when Sirius had been in earshot, had a beautifully posh London accent, and always ensured that his shining, dark hair was spiked, perfectly, straight down the center of his scalp.  
  
_It's almost like he's poking fun at Sirius, isn't it?_ James had said, once, before he was forced to spend the rest of the day with a bag of ice cubes Spello-taped to his crotch, after Sirius upturned his bowl of soup into James's lap.  
  
"Well?" says Dearborn. His empty plate is pushed neatly to the side; he shuffles the stack of parchment in front of him like a clerk, with easy fingers and a thumb used to turning pages and avoiding unsightly paper cuts. Sirius remembers seeing the first time Dearborn held his wand with hands like that, clean and practiced, and cast a curse cold enough to chill Sirius's pride, if not his blood.  
  
"Hmn?" Sirius blinks and wipes his fingers on the condensation of his glass, dries it on his sleeve.  
  
"What do we think? Do we take it?" Dearborn's thumb glides over the words _informant_ , _expects movement in two weeks_.  
  
"S'no question we can _do_ it," Sirius muses. "Right?"  
  
"No question," agrees Dearborn. "Except, do we take it."  
  
"So, why not?" Sirius shrugs. "You can't play the danger card with me."  
  
"Wouldn't dream of it, darling."  
  
"Ta," Sirius just barely resists the urge to throw a crisp at him. "I mean. If it's not us, it's just two somebody elses, honestly, and at least we know we won't bugger it up."  
  
"Well said," Dearborn nods. There is a hesitation, though, in the way he fingers the corner of the parchment pieces.  
  
"But?" Sirius catches Dearborn's face in the narrow space of a squint.  
  
"There is the matter of your – " Dearborn opens a palm, knuckles down on the table, fingers catching at the air. " – sensitivity to the persons at hand. Potentially, you see."  
  
" _Sensitivity_ ," Sirius sneers, and leans back in the booth, finding Dearborn suddenly a little close for comfort. "It's not a _sensitivity_. It's not an issue."  
  
"Potentially," says Dearborn again, and Sirius feels the curl in his lip like an involuntary nerve.  
  
"My brother – " he snaps, and then leans forward on his elbows, voice lowered to a hiss. "Regulus is not fucking _smart_ enough to run their kind of shite, yeah? He's bloody eighteen and a bloody coward, there's no way in hell anyone as mad as Voldemort is going to trust him with this sort of information, even a fucking shipment of very dark knick-knacks, for Christ's sake."  
  
"Such faith," murmurs Dearborn.  
  
"Forget it," says Sirius, firmly, skin hot and throat suddenly dry. "And I wouldn't give a shit if he were the Dark Bloody Lord himself, all right?"  
  
Dearborn raises an eyebrow, and takes a small sip of his wine.  
  
"What," challenges Sirius.  
  
"Cheers," says Dearborn, and tips his glass in Sirius's direction. "I do see now why they've not bothered with you in the slightest."  
  
"Too much _trouble_."  
  
“Mm. Up Lions, indeed," murmurs Dearborn, and drains his glass.  
  
Sirius eyes him narrowly. “You’re a Ravenclaw.”  
  
“ _Was_ , darling. But our team was just awful when I was at school – did nothing to inspire any kind of loyalty.”  
  
"You defected to Gryffindor," Sirius raises an eyebrow not because he doesn't believe it's the right choice; it's only nobody else seems to think so.  
  
"When so inclined," says Dearborn. "Besides, given the intrinsic qualities and a rather enviable long-standing rivalry, the matches just happened to be much more exciting."  
  
"Better songs, too."  
  
"Oh, better than most," says Dearborn, and hums a few notes into his wine glass.  
  
“Honestly, a match would have more to worry about, eh," says Sirius. "It’s two bloody _messengers_. It's some poor bloke’s cow field, not a battlefield in the middle of Diagon. Probably do as well to send House Elves, with how much of a fight they’ll put up.”  
  
“Your overconfidence is precisely the reason I am considering asking Dumbledore to stretch our already thinning personnel,” says Dearborn, with a strangely gentle smile.  
  
"Oi, come on - I'm not letting James get involved," Sirius snaps, and hardly knows why he does. "They've already got it out for him, considering he's done as well as spit on Voldemort's boots."  
  
"Certainly not – Dumbledore did agree," Dearborn inclines his head, Mohawk dipping through the air. "And what about – "  
  
"No," says Sirius.  
  
"No?" says Dearborn.  
  
“There’s no one else,” he says.  
  
"Ah," says Dearborn.  
  
It's not that Remus couldn't, thinks Sirius. It's not that he's untrustworthy or weak or lacking in the courage it takes (been bathing in his own blood since he was _five_ , Christ, thinks Sirius). He doesn't know, quite, why it is that he says no, no, not them. Protection isn't all that silly, thinks Sirius. Brotherhood is an awfully fertile breeding ground for irrationality: just look at all that history tied up in crimes of passion, and passionate mistakes. He is, after all, Still Adjusting. So he doesn't quite know, but it's good of Dearborn not to ask. Gentlemanly of him.  
  
"Well – " Sirius chews on a thumbnail. "Well?"  
  
"Of course," says Dearborn, neatly.  
  
"Reliable?"  
  
"The source?" Dearborn's eyebrows waver. "Well. Who is to say, honestly?"  
  
"Bloody reassuring," Sirius snorts, and wads a paper serviette into a ball between his hands. "Fuck it, let's give 'em what for. It'll still be a blast even if it's not a surprise, eh?"  
  
"Well, then," says Dearborn. "It appears close to being settled. We shall owl Dumbledore for the exact details, immediately?"  
  
"Yeah," Sirius grunts, into his emptying glass. "'mmediately."  
  
"It will not be _easy_ , Black – " stresses Dearborn, folding the pieces of parchment in his palms – once, twice, four times, seven, nine, twelve, until they're a neat triangle, only about the size of a teaspoon. " – it's not that I doubt your concentration on the matter, only that you – "  
  
"- what?" snaps Sirius. "Threw up the first time I saw an eviscerated Muggle? Beg your fucking pardon, for that."  
  
Dearborn crooks an eyebrow. "It is not your propensity for vomit that bothers me, darling."  
  
"Faggot," Sirius mutters, and Dearborn catches his wrist in a grip hard enough to bruise.  
  
"You," says Dearborn, bones creaking under the ring of his fingers. "Are very intelligent, skilled, and quick on your feet. But you are a violent man with a short fuse. I can say this about you, and I barely _know_ you, except for your delectable choices of dining establishments, so I can only imagine how your mentors and friends are worried that you will, if you will excuse the expression, go absolutely stark raving mad one of these days."  
  
" _Ow_ ," says Sirius. "Christ. Fucking _let go_ , already."  
  
And Dearborn does, settling his hands back into his own lap, fingers laced together and he sighs; Sirius rotates his wrist with a glare at his own empty beer glass.  
  
"Well," says Dearborn.  
  
"Oh, don’t fucking worry about it," mutters Sirius. “It’s on me.”  
  
"Ah," says Dearborn. "Cheers. We'll be in touch, darling."  
  
He pushes away from the table, leather trousers creaking as he stands. The darkness of the open door swallows him up, and Sirius orders another beer, because otherwise, he thinks, really, what a fucking waste the night would be.  
  
  
\--  
  
  
_Wake up._ Sirius.  
  
Sirius gropes in the buttery air, catches at the soft curve of a hip and grins. "Whut," he mumbles.  
  
_Up_ , Remus murmurs. We have to get up.  
  
"Mm. Why?" Sirius mutters, with all the practiced petulance of twenty years as a prince.  
  
_Have to stop dreaming sometime_.  
  
It doesn't sit right. It sounds like a clench in the gears, a disruption of sunlight, a scratch on the victrola. He cracks one eye open, and the shadows are purple and gold, fuzzy around the edges, and Remus, just in focus, is smiling like he's told a joke. His hair is sticking up, oddly, a smudge of sleep over his cheekbone, and the cut across his shoulder – the one from the fourteenth, oh what a _rollicking_ bloody old time – has grown a little scabby now.  
  
"Bastard," he groans, tugging on Remus's hair. "You fight fucking _un_ -fair."  
  
The sheets rustle, and Remus's hips slide from Sirius's fingers, his form slipping out into the slate-cold air, naked and shivering and looking for a pair of trousers; his thighs bend just level with Sirius's eyes when he bends to pick them up from the floor.  
  
"We've got thirty minutes," Remus murmurs; Sirius watches his white fingers slip into the waistband to tug it closed. "Christ, s'cold."  
  
"Socks," Sirius says, sitting up to fish them from the tangle of blankets at his feet. "Here," he waits until Remus's hand is over his own, and tugs them close – socks and Remus all – noses bumping.  
  
"Ta," Remus whispers. "Up, now?"  
  
"Coffee," says Sirius, and pokes Remus in the chest with a knotted sock.  
  
"Toast," says Remus, and presses his lips to the side of Sirius's mouth. And so, thinks Sirius, and so, it's a deal, uncharacteristically simple and sweet, and tasting so vaguely of toothpaste and wheat crumbs, and jellied apple preserves.  
  
A portion of the Order of the Phoenix meets at eleven-twenty-six that Thursday morning, in the cramped attic space of Emmeline Vance's country cottage. Lily in the only proper seat, the rose-pink plush of the upholstery wreaking havoc with her hair, hands folded on her belly, and James perched on the arm, wrists to his knees and back bent along the line of the rafters. Peter sitting on a pile of filing folders, tucking back the occasional errant photograph with his ankle. Dearborn on the banister like a well-mannered raven, Elphias sitting on the curve of a coat rack with his silly hat, McGonagall on the windowsill with dust and sunlight coiled in her hair, Longbottoms like an inseparable force, cramped above packing trunks.  
  
"We are clear, then, I believe," says Dumbledore, settled comfortably in a pile of old fur stoles and an oversized, plush-purple sunhat perched on his knee. "If necessary, the Muggles will be redirected. Once the situation has been deemed acceptable for appropriate action, Mr Black and Mr Dearborn will attempt to intercept before the meeting takes place. There is already a Portkey placed, preemptively, and quite kindly, by our own Arabella, this morning - it will take you to a location far enough away to consider the more usual methods of return, to London. Unfortunately, as some of the events in the Ministry have shown, the simplest escape is rarely the safest. I would stress that, if you feel as though you run the risk of being followed, for any reason, you exhaust all other possibilities before Apparition.”  
  
"And no excess bravery, Mr Black," murmurs McGonagall, from the back.  
  
"What? Or detention?" Sirius grins, and Lily smacks him on the shoulder.  
  
"I am also quite aware," says Dumbledore, stroking the hat on his knee like an absurd cat, "that there is some nature of – "  
  
"If anyone says _sensitivity_ ," mutters Sirius, in Remus's ear, "I'm going to kick them in the bollocks."  
  
" – hostility entering into this particular arrangement. We cannot be assured that any of those taking part in this supposed transfer of potentially vital goods and information are actually the ones responsible for recent losses taken, and felt quite deeply, I know, by our members." Dumbledore's eyes take on the light of a shivering memory, a Pensieve-coloured silver.  
  
"I urge restraint," he says.  
  
"Of course, Headmaster," says Dearborn; Sirius refuses to meet his eyes.  
  
"Excellent." The word is like a knife on a whetstone, and they are disbanded, slowly. Emmeline offers tea, but the Longbottoms go with apologies, and Peter slips down the stairwell with a clap to Dearborn's shoulder. Elphias and Dumbledore seem to have disappeared into the shadows at some point between steeping and pouring, and Sirius thinks it strange only because Dumbledore's never one to pass up a scone at noonish. Sober business, he thinks. All this _thinking_ and talking and planning and waiting, and no room for baked goods.  
  
James catches him at the shoulder when he leans in to take a cuppa, fingers hooked in Sirius's collar.  
  
"Edgar Bones," he says.  
  
"Shut it," says Sirius. "Never happen."  
  
"Not again, you mean," says James, and touches the back of Sirius's head with an open palm. Peter found the bodies, and had no one to shout for, except them, and so. It stays with you, thinks Sirius. The last bloodless puff of life and the waste of a talented existence and the way a limp arm can look so different when it's sleep, or when it's -- well.  
  
Sirius glares at him. "Look, it's not – "  
  
"Don’t let them – I mean," says James. "You promise me."  
  
What do we do, thinks Sirius. How are we even surprised, anymore, by what we say after being injected with revenge, sharp and hot on the tip of the tongue and sizzling for release in your fingers.  
  
"Right," he says, and means it. The morning after they found the Bones family, he tried to warm the kettle with his wand, and he scorched his eyebrows off instead. It'll be a relief, he thinks, and grins, not to have to lie and call the burn marks on the tile an effort in redecoration. And Remus, who would be skeptical of his own body's existence if the proof hadn't been quite so undeniable, could just believe him.  
  
Christ, thinks Sirius. And Remus, who looks lovely covered in dust, he thinks. Radiant in the little specks of light that have settled in his hair, in his eyelashes, fingers painted ivory in the way the light is slatted through the roof. He chews on a thumbnail when he thinks no one is looking, temple pressed to the tiny window, foot braced against a rafter, back curved against a stack of leather-bound books, and he looks fifteen again, boundless amounts of that guarded naivety and those old-man sweater vests, and that smile.  
  
Thank god, Sirius thinks, and burns his tongue when he drinks his tea too quickly. Thank god for greed and grief, he thinks, because now you’ll believe me when we win.  
  
  
\--  
  
  
He is writing a letter to Narcissa. He sits on the floor in the corner of the library by the stacks labeled _History, Magic: 1701-1799, Austria, Wars, Disagreements, & General Misunderstandings_ with a book open on his lap and the spare, ragged end of a parchment roll spread over the pages, and the inkwell by his feet, and he writes _Dear Narcissa How are you I am sorry to have missed you over Christmas Holidays I hope you are well and that France is fine I saw Lucius not long ago did he tell you that I think I would like to come see you this summer in France if you are still there_ in one go, because it is how every letter to her starts, more or less, and if he gets it out that way to begin with, he can crumple it up and start over with a clearer sort of head (if he has one, he thinks, at all).  
  
His arm hurt again, tonight. It was odd, he thought, when he woke from a fitful hour of sleep with the feeling of his veins twisting inside his skin. It was odd, because it was not what Lucius had said, but he imagined that Lucius didn't feel the need to scrape out his own brain with the nearest sharp instrument just because he couldn't find sleep. He imagined, as he pulled on his shoes, and took his wand from the bedside table, and slipped out of the dormitory into the dark and empty corridors, that when Lucius cannot sleep, he simply has a glass of brandy, and pets his dogs, and then everything is all quite lovely again.  
  
But I'm very young, he thinks, quill paused over the paper, ink already smudged on his fingertips. I'm very young still, Lucius says it all the time; _they say it all the time_. And sometimes, he thinks, lately, they say it as if it's pride.  Maybe that's why, he thinks, and bends to the parchment again, raising his wand to get more light, maybe that's why it's different. Because I have some growing to do, yet?  
  
He writes,  _Are you proud of me._ He wants her to say it; he would like to read that sort of thing from Narcissa Malfoy  _n_ _ee_  Black, that she was proud of him, for whatever it was that he had done for her to be proud of.  If he ever sent the letters, those ones, the ones with  _ARE YOU PROUD OF ME PROUD OF ME LIKE LUCIUS IS OR LIKE YOU ARE IF YOU ARE ARE YOU PROUD OF ME_  scrawled like screaming music notes, like runes and wriggling lines of steam over the page.  If he ever sent those letters, he would like to read that.  So he writes,  _Are you proud of me_ , tonight, without any intention, of course, except that maybe -- well, one day.  Tonight, he writes _a-r-e-y-o-u-p-r-o-u-d-o-f-m-e-?_ but pauses, in the first curve of the question mark.  His quill stops, he cannot think of what comes next, body suddenly stilled and rigid, because there is the soft rustle of robes from the far end of the room and getting slowly nearer, a growing, winking light of a wand filtering through the stacks, and someone's voice, humming.   
  
It is so unexpected; he cannot quite bring himself to panic. It is so unexpected, the _Nox_ is not even past the curve of his throat before the Headmaster rounds the corner, bareheaded and singing to himself, with his hand trailing absently along the spines of the books on the shelf for _Hungarian-Austrian Insults of the 1730s._ He is wearing a robe with small bells on the cuffs, and blue-silk stars against the hems, and he has very plain, white slippers on his feet, and he looks as if he is thoroughly pleased to be here, where he is, as if there is a purpose in not having any purpose at all, as if Doing The Right Thing, and Running A School For Burgeoning Witches And Wizards Otherwise Known As Hellions, and Being Very Wise Apparently, were not so different from sleepwalking, after all.  
  
Dumbledore pauses, there, at the end of the shelves, because he sees Regulus, there, at the end of the aisle (how could he not, thinks Regulus, finally).  
  
“Ah," says Dumbledore, so lightly, it is like dust.  
  
Regulus cannot speak, and there are bells on the cuffs of the Headmaster’s robes, and they catch all the light of his wand.  
  
“Well,” says Dumbledore (and the bells say _well-well-well_ when he moves his arm, slightly _)_. "I do beg your pardon. Terribly rude of me."  
  
Regulus stares, quietly. The light from his wand makes the shadows smooth, and the leather surfaces of the books and the skin of Dumbledore's cheeks all look very rich and young. His hair is golden in the hovering dark, and he is smiling, and Regulus is wearing his school trousers and a night shirt with the sleeves rolled up, sitting on the floor of the library with his wand arm raised to the light, of course.  
  
"Ah," says Dumbledore, again, and takes a silent step forward.  
  
"Sir," says Regulus; it feels like dust on his tongue.  
  
Dumbledore's robes are like chimes, soundless on the floor and speaking for the air; he moves a few paces closer, and crouches slowly, with young-man bones and movement, and an old-man beard pooling on the floor. He has his wrinkled hands on his knees, and he looks at Regulus with his sharp, confident, secretive eyes, and he opens his mouth to speak.  
  
“Don’t,” says Regulus. “Sir?”  
  
Dumbledore is very close, and his eyes are very bright, and Regulus thinks he can smell things like sandalwood and lemon sugar and warm wool, and the heavy, musking pulse of living things. And it makes his gut draw up, tightly; he feels bile in his throat, and something skittering in the back of his skull digs rigid, painful fingernails into his nerve endings.  
  
"Don't,” he says. “Don’t pander to me.”  
  
Dumbledore pauses. Regulus cannot say if he is surprised, or even caught remotely off-guard. Headmaster to hundreds of students for decades and decades and decades, thinks Regulus, do you really think he's never heard anyone try and stand up to him before? Perhaps, he thinks, it is because he has been taught to be polite. Lucius was right about power: strength and honey, he said, and it makes Regulus think of the core of a wand, or the way his own handwriting is bold and black and indelible, how it came from his own fingers.  
  
“Please,” says Regulus. “I mean.”  
  
"You will be leaving us, then," says Dumbledore, finally. ( _Th-th-then_ , say the bells.)  
  
"I don't know," says Regulus. "Maybe."  
  
"Ah," murmurs Dumbledore, leaning forward like a secret, wandlight in his hair and skin, and on the tip of his tongue. "Know that I will not fight for you, then. I think, perhaps, there are those who need you more than I?"  
  
"I'm sorry," says Regulus, his ribs shaking, with how fast his heart is beating. "I don't care what you think."  
  
Dumbledore smiles; eyes like the spark of sun through an icicle. "And how refreshing," he says. "It is so rare that that happens to be true."  
  
Regulus opens his palm over his knee, over the parchment; his fingers smear the ink of _I think I would like to come and see you this summer in_ , because they were written all tall and hurried and rather close-together, at the time.  
  
“Well,” says Dumbledore. “Then.”  
  
And he straightens, slowly, and his beard uncoils from the floor and the hem of his robes stir up the dust and the small bells stir up the air, and his face slips back into the wrinkling shadows and the grey-light, and Regulus lowers his wand, and he feels the ink drying smeared on his fingers.  
  
“Again,” says Dumbledore. “My apologies.”  
  
Regulus blinks, once, and there is a great unraveling. The shadows eat at Dumbledore's face, when he turns, and his long fingers look old and shriveled and grey when he places a hand on the book-spines again, and his footsteps are slow, and even, and quite heavy for such a small sort of man.  
  
"Oi!" grumbles a book, from down the stack. "Put out yer light - _yer light_!"  
  
"Now, now," he hears Dumbledore murmur, like a soft pat on the shoulder, like a lullaby, a windchime. "No need to fret."  
  
And he hums, again, as he disappears into the shadows, mostly tuneless, vaguely happy, and Regulus hisses _Nox_ , because the ache in his arm is gone, because the back of his skull is empty, an instant void where he had just felt so overfull and quartered, and he is suddenly alone and deaf and empty, and shaking with decisiveness, in the dark.  
  
  
\--  
  
  
Sirius presses his nose to the crease of a thigh and breathes; there are musty sheets tangled around his ears and eyes, and his fingers are cramped sleepily under Remus's ankle. He flexes his palm, knuckles rasping along a thin tendon, and drags his tongue down into the sweaty divot of Remus's hipbone.  
  
"M _gnn_ ph," says Remus, and shoves a trembling hand down into the blankets, skittish ribs jumping under Sirius's fingers.  
  
"Shut it," Sirius mumbles into his skin, and bares his teeth to catch the shudder against his tongue.  
  
" _Black_ \-- "  
  
"You love it, shut up," says Sirius, and splays his thumb and fingers open slow enough to feel the resistance in Remus's hips, and then the give, the bruising reluctance with which he sighs, and lets his head tip back (his fingers are still clenched over his own belly, holding a fistful of sheet). Sirius closes his teeth over the filmy skin at the inside of Remus's thigh.  
  
"Mnn _phh_ ," says Remus again, and his hips cant restlessly; the way his left side rocks upwards means he's turned his head and bit the pillow, arm crooked, eyes squeezed shut.  
  
"Stop laughing," says Sirius.  
  
"F-fucking," Remus gasps, a fine tremble in his legs. "Fucking christ, I'm – I'm _not_."  
  
"Are," Sirius grins, and bites.  
  
"Prove it," Remus hisses; Sirius can hear the chatter of teeth in his voice, the way he shakes like he's freezing when he's excited and aroused and shaken out of sleep by the feeling of someone's _mouth_ on his _skin_. As if it were such a foreign concept, Sirius thinks, to be considered, like that.  
  
“Don’t you fucking tell me what to do,” Sirius grins, breath soft, sliding a thumb _just_ this side of crooking inside.  
  
“Ah - ” Remus rasps, grabs a fistful of his hair and _pulls_ , hard enough to jerk Sirius’s head back, away.  
  
“Christ!” Sirius hisses, eyes smarting. “Moony – ”  
  
“Sorry – don’t, just – ” Remus makes a helpless gesture with one hand, face red and pinched, hair plastered to his forehead. He collapses back against the pillow, palm pressed to his closed eyes. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to - ”  
  
Sirius rubs at his scalp, finding Remus’s fingers there. “Just - ” he murmurs. “Just a tease, eh?”  
  
“Ah,” says Remus. “I know,” but clearly doesn’t. His eyes are glassy when they open, and there is blood showing under every inch of his skin in a mottled flush.  
  
Sirius holds himself up on an elbow, joints creaking, heat in his thighs and the Not-Quite-Guilt, like a filmy layer, pooling in the creases of his sweaty skin. “Look,” he says. “Are you – ”  
  
“Are you going to fuck me, or not?” whispers Remus, in the dark.  
  
He is very good at grinning that way, thinks Sirius. He has perfected the lascivious edge of a smile, he is top marks at that pooling darkness of the eyes and the bitten lips and the Way To Flex Your Hips. The irreplaceable hiccough-laugh when Sirius surprises him. Well-studied existence. Well above average performance, even half-asleep.  
  
“Moony,” says Sirius.  
  
“You’re stalling,” says Remus, and draws a knee up; it slides again Sirius’s ribs. “Honestly wasn’t a trick question.”  
  
“Remus,” says Sirius.  
  
“Shut up, will you,” whispers Remus, and curls himself forward to kiss Sirius’s mouth. There is that patchy scrape of stubble just under his jaw, the bump of his odd, long nose, the perfected, gawky curve of his neck, his spine, the way his collarbone feels in the half-dark: links of bone and tissue roped together, held in shape by negative space, by the missing pieces of other people.  
  
He can’t help it – how carefully Remus puts together these moments - the crafted delicacy makes him laugh.  
  
“What,” says Remus, a thread of light between them in the haze, where his whisper dissolves.  
  
“I’m not,” says Sirius, and presses his mouth to the tuft of sweaty hair over his temple. “Not if you.”  
  
“Christ,” says Remus, and tugs a little at the blankets tangled at their hips. He exhales sharply between his lips, and his hair tickles Sirius’s cheek. “Honestly?”  
  
“Mm,” says Sirius, nudging him back against the mattress.  
  
“I preferred it when you forced me against my will, you know,” mumbles Remus, elbows up, fists rubbing against his eyes, the tingling cool settling into the places where their skin rasps together, the slow un-arousal.  
  
Sirius snorts. “Bullshit.”  
  
“Possibly. But you can’t prove it,” says Remus. Sirius watches him from above, from all fours, from This Place: Remus Lupin breathing slowly, Remus Lupin with grey-light skin and a red bite on the inside of his thigh, Remus Lupin with his face turned to profile, with sweat on his lip and his eyes lidded to the world, Remus Lupin with one hand open on the pillow, Remus Lupin once again, victorious, in the battle against True Love.  
  
“Wanker,” mutters Sirius. “You - ”  
  
“It’s raining, now.”  
  
"Mph – " Sirius moves his head with great effort, tucking himself under Remus's chin. And so it is. He can see the places on the window where the water is wiping down the grime, little clear streaks in the city's filter: too light for sound, and the hue in the clouds is just this side of the sun.  
  
"Bollocks the rain," he says.  
  
“And the valiant struggle continues,” says Remus. “Sirius Black vee Nature.”  
  
“Mph,” says Sirius, again. They should fall asleep again, he thinks. They should stop all these moments when the waking gets in the way and lets the world penetrate their bones and blood and tongues and eyes and words. He thinks, I shouldn’t get up today.  
  
“Almost lost it there, didn’t you?” he says.  
  
There is quiet. There is the sudden stutter of wind and water on a drainpipe. There is the sound of Remus’s body, and the sheets tangled in their ankles and the looped belts on the floor and the unwashed dishes in the sink and the teakettle half-full of cold water and the two pairs of boots at the door. And there is that challenge of the next breath, like a metronome keeping the world measured in its chaos.  
  
“Yes,” says Remus.  
  
“I know,” says Remus.  
  
“I must be slipping.”  
  
  
\--  
  
  
The next morning, he stumbles out of the half-lit bedroom, into the kitchen, and finds Remus with his elbows on the table – who is fully dressed, and who does not _seem_ as though they got very little sleep, and who does not look up – reading yesterday’s _Prophet_ , and eating a piece of dry toast.  
  
“It’s Tuesday,” he says.  
  
Remus looks vaguely in the direction of the clock, which hasn’t told proper time in ages, but sometimes still tells them that it’s time to take out the rubbish on the appropriate day. “It is, yes.”  
  
“You have work?” he says, and feels very lazy and unwashed, which isn’t so peculiar as just particularly annoying, at the moment. “Don’t you have work?”  
  
Remus does not look up; he is chewing a corner of his piece of toast. “I’ve quit,” he says.  
  
“You were sacked again, you mean,” Sirius snorts, and peers inside the kettle, which has gone cold.  
  
Remus glares, briefly. “If I’d meant I was sacked - ”  
  
“Why the hell would you go and – ” Sirius sighs. “You were looking for ages.”  
  
Remus shrugs; the newspaper rustles suggestively between his hands. “Comparatively,” he says. “I suppose.”  
  
Sirius taps the kettle, and it makes an irritated little squeak. “Pay not good enough for you?”  
  
He can _hear_ the tiny frown in Remus’s voice: it has the same little between-the-eyebrows wrinkles on the consonants, the downward turn of the vowels. “You don’t have to be an absolute prick. It wasn’t your job, as far as I know.”  
  
“You just forgot to mention, then, that you were going on that Ministry dole?” Sirius snaps, prodding the kettle again. I can’t _stand_ self-sacrifice, he thinks, it just sits there quietly in the corner of the kitchen and eats its toast and lets the kettle go cold and has absolutely _no regard_ , he thinks, no regard at all for the rest of us.  
  
“Christ, no,” Remus laughs, sharply. “Not quite that desperate, yet.”  
  
“Oh,” says Sirius. “Oh, good. Because.”  
  
“I know,” says Remus, neatly. “I’d tell you. If.”  
  
“Don’t do that,” Sirius sighs. “Sell a few organs, first, or something, all right? Or go to Prongs, even.”  
  
Remus laughs again, a little softer, a little rounder on the edges, and the newspaper rustles again, and Sirius knows that he is being watched now, with those modestly-brown eyes, with that funny sort of scrutiny, where he will be ashamed, if he’s caught looking.  
  
“In that order, hm?” says Remus.  
  
Sirius waves a distracted hand, and glances back over his shoulder. “Oh, whichever suits you, _princess_.”  
  
“ _Don’t_ ,” Remus pulls a face, and bends to the paper again. “It’s before eleven, let’s do let me live through the morning with my masculinity relatively intact, hm?”  
  
“You’re going to be an awful sort if all you do from here on is laze around the flat and be shirty,” he grins; Remus flips him two fingers, over the top edge of the paper, and he reaches over, and catches at them.  
  
“You’ll learn to live with it,” says Remus, smartly, pulling his hand free. “Or I can show you where the floo is, hm?”  
  
“So,” he says, uptick in his voice, fingers catching at the corners of the _Prophet_.  
  
“Other commitments,” Remus says, finally. “They were starting to get in the way – I couldn’t. Not conscionably, anyway.”  
  
“Not the Order,” he frowns.  
  
“What possible _other_ commitment,” Remus rolls his eyes, and folds the paper, finally, onto the table. “There might be. I mean, we could be gone for months on end, if things don’t let up.”  
  
He hadn’t heard anything about _that_ , and watches Remus’s face sharply. “He’s said that,” he asks.  
  
“In so many words, no,” Remus says, and Sirius has absolutely _no idea_ if he’s lying. “But.”  
  
“He’s not paying us, you know,” he mutters, and goes to get the steaming kettle.  
  
“Not paying _you_ ,” grins Remus, and Sirius satisfies his anxiety and violence and affection by snapping Remus’s ankle, soundly, with a dishtowel.  
  
  
\--  
  
  
He doesn't come here very often. There's nothing much here, any more. Old school robes in the closet, and a collection of dust in the corner of the kitchen. He finds a few things in the cupboard, in an old hatbox they stole from McGonagall's office in fourth year: a compass with a silver needle, a canteen, a soft suede rucksack, a pair of woolly socks, and a broken quill.  
  
In the loo, he washes out the canteen, and the mirror stirs.  
  
"Hullo," it says sleepily, frame smothered under a webbing of ashy dust. "Come back, have you?"  
  
"Not really," says Sirius. "Sorry, love."  
  
"Hm," it says. "I thought you'd died."  
  
He snorts. But the floorboards have surprise in their groans; the spare furniture doesn't fit his solid body. The leaking pipes and the disrepair is indignant, a natural process interfered upon, the decay gone stolid.  
  
“Didn’t miss me?” he says, and swipes a palm over his reflection; his fingers come away pale grey, and filthy.  
  
“ _I_ didn’t,” it says.  
  
“Bullshit you didn’t,” he smirks; he taps the canteen against the edge of the sink and ignores the gut-curl of guilt when rust flakes off the faucet. “You could be so lucky to find a another face like mine - a _thousand_ years and you’d never, you know.”  
  
“You were prettier before,” says the mirror.  
  
Sirius raises an eyebrow. “Eh?”  
  
“Mm,” says the mirror, demure and cottony, words slurred and stretched like the tail end of a yawn. “Terribly sorry to say, but it’s all downhill from here.”  
  
Sirius grins, leaning the heels of his hands against the basin. “Cursed with an early peak, eh?”  
  
“Nobody ever _really_ peaks,” says the mirror. There is something odd about the room, about the dust and the slowly crumbling light, the rain clogging up the windows and sticking to the brick, viscous and dark and smothering. “It’s all quite a bit duller than all that.”  
  
Sirius grimaces. “Weren’t always this bloody dire, were you?”  
  
“Oh, it comes and goes,” it says. “Do remember to put out the light this time.”  
  
Hand on the switch, Sirius grins. “’til we meet again, love.”  
  
In the wet and hazy light, the mirror laughs. Sirius almost stumbles in the corridor; it sends a rimy curl up through every thin and trembling layer of his skin.  
  
  
\--  
  
  
Remus is asleep by the window. Sirius stands with one hand resting on the doorknob, with a hot and greasy paper bag tucked under his arm, with a prickle wriggling at the base of his spine all day, and he lets the dust settle under his feet. Remus is asleep by the window, and it makes his jaw hot, like anger, or shame. There are stripes of light on the faded fabric of the armchair, there are battered trainers tucked against the wall, there is Remus’s wand laid out at arm’s reach, a little crooked at the end and always vaguely humming.  
  
Every now and then, now, thinks Sirius, he gets this feeling: like there is a great blunted spoon slowly working at de-pulping all his human insides. It comes in the morning, sometimes, in the streets of Diagon, where the world is terrified and grey and it is dangerous to believe your own shadow on the wall. It comes in the rain, in the night, when he cannot even fathom having a brain, any more, not like this, what with everything inside it and he turns three times around himself on the rug in front of the fireplace, and falls asleep as an animal. It comes in the quietest moments. Fuck, he thinks, I wasn’t meant for any of this, he thinks. That’s what this is, he thinks, this even, slow scooping-out. I am losing my mind, he thinks, because Remus is asleep at the window.  
  
“You awake?” whispers Sirius, in the doorway.  
  
There is a vague stirring in the chair – a pulse flutters in Remus’s jugular. Life, thinks Sirius, when he crosses the room, _La, ta-dah_ , and the world hasn’t stopped, after all.  
  
“Oi,” says Sirius, and smiles a little, when Remus bats at his head, eyes still closed.  
  
“G’way,” says Remus. “You’re a nightmare, aren’t you?”  
  
“Nightmare with curry,” says Sirius, and presses his mouth to the dry skin of Remus’s jaw.  
  
“Awful,” mumbles Remus, and curls his fingers in the air above his thighs.  
  
“Up,” Sirius insists. “I’m leaving at half-four, you git.”  
  
Remus readjusts his body, shoulders hunching and rolling down his spine as he sits up. He rubs a red cheek with his palm and looks at Sirius, quietly, over the curl of his fingers. “Left just enough time for food, did you?”  
  
“Priorities,” says Sirius, dropping the paper bag into Remus’s lap. “There. Make yourself useful while I find something to eat with.”  
  
“Other than your fingers,” murmurs Remus, but he is picking apart the opening of the crumpled bag, head dipped low to inhale the heat and spice and paper-carton familiarity. From across the room, hands paused above the cutlery drawer, Sirius watches him hunker onto the floor, legs crossed, carefully laying out the containers. Pathetic ritual, thinks Sirius, you couldn’t have gone for something more – well, he thinks, it could be all dinner linens and posh starlit strolls and something about roses, but right now it is just the comfort of Remus’s slow divisions: #42 Him #8 Him, #12 Me, #26-with-no-onions Him, #14 Me, #18 Me and a #7-to-share.  
  
“You’re a lazy bastard, by the by,” says Sirius, from the kitchen, even though he knows the full moon is pushing heavy and fat at the horizon. “You were in that exact fucking spot three hours ago.”  
  
“Guilty,” says Remus, ripping a packet of hot sauce open with his teeth and two fingers.  
  
“Good kip, eh?” says Sirius, settling beside him, hooking a carton towards him with his thumb.  
  
“Like the dead,” says Remus.  
  
“Looked it,” says Sirius, and hands him a fork.  
  
“Morbid, today,” says Remus, and no, thinks Sirius, it would be lovely. I am an Optimist, he thinks, to believe that one day we might all be that fucking oblivious.  
  
Maybe, he thinks, that is dark, all things considered.  
  
But he laughs, instead, with the tines of the fork between his teeth. “Let it never be said that I wasn’t prepared for the worst,” he says, wagging the fork in Remus’s direction.  
  
“And what is the worst, in this case?” asks Remus, suddenly, in that awful and peevish way he has of turning absolutely acceptable forced levity into a Serious Discussion About Things That Matter While Never Having to Say Anything Himself.  
  
“Well,” says Sirius, and stabs a fork into his rice, and thinks that the last time he had a conversation about his own death was over cold, badly cooked lamb and boiled cabbage in the kitchens of Grimmauld Place, with his brother. “Well, _yeah_. There's that.”  
  
“There’s that,” repeats Remus, his eyes down-turned, their eyes both down-turned.  
  
“Augh,” Sirius mutters. “Come off it.”  
  
Remus rolls his eyes; the shift of his body has a heavy tension in it, where the muscles get bunched and rolled up into the defensive shrug of his shoulders and spine and the creak of his knees.  
  
“It’s just rotten timing,” Sirius says. “All right, you’ll be – you’ve been alone loads of times, and Wormtail’ll make sure you’re set up fine, at the start, eh, so.”  
  
“I didn’t,” says Remus, frowning at him. “That’s not what I meant. You don’t even know what you’re talking about. You don’t even. I mean.”  
  
Sirius looks at him, sharply, because the pulse suddenly plummeting deep and electric into his gut doesn’t know whether it is excited or absolutely _furious_ , that Remus think he gets to be _worried_ about this sort of thing.  
  
“It’s dangerous,” says Remus, finally.  
  
“Like a cornered bludger, maybe,” Sirius snaps, because, well. Well, he thinks, he’s only been waiting all day to be in this space and now Remus, of course, has to do this sort of thing, now, when he isn’t ready and hasn’t had any sort of time to be suave and collected and appropriately brave when it all comes crashing down around his ears, finally. Of course, he thinks, he _would_. “I said, come off it.”  
  
“I’m not,” says Remus, frowning. “This is - ”  
  
“This is fucking stupid, is what.”  
  
“It’s not,” says Remus, firmly, suddenly. “I think it’s not, actually.”  
  
“ _Actually_ ,” Sirius jabs a fork in his direction. “I’m too fucking old for you to still talk to me like that.”  
  
“Like that,” Remus repeats, mouth full of derision and sautéed spinach.  
  
“Like I fucking need fucking _looking after_.”  
  
Remus is immediately silent, because – of course – he is well aware of how it will drive Sirius mad with what _that_ means.  
  
“’the hell,” he spits, and sets the carton down, heavily. “You still think I’ve got no bloody clue what you’re so hung up on. You _still_.”  
  
“Oh, honestly,” Remus sighs. The sound has years of enforced doubt behind it, and it makes Sirius want to poke and tug and scrape at it with his fork tines until it’s all wound up and stuffed down somebody _else’s_ throat. Just not his.  
  
“How stupid do you think I am,” he says. “Just because _you’re_ terrified - ”  
  
Remus does not look at him, but it is the way his wrist stills, slightly, the way his body shifts: Pinned, thinks Sirius. _Got you, at least_.  
  
“I haven’t said anything about - ”  
  
“There's nothing wrong with it," he says.  
  
Remus looks up at him with narrowed eyes. “I’ve never - ”  
  
“Look, isn’t everybody? Now and then, eh, so just – it’s fine, I said. Only normal, all right?”  
  
Remus’s fist closes around the fork handle, tightly; his voice is sharp. "Oh, because if I'm not reassured of my humanity every hour or so, I'll just forget entirely?”  
  
"Christ! Don’t fucking – it has nothing to _do_ with that. It’s only the same as being spooked by the idea of the bloody Grim," he snaps, furious when Remus saves the jabs for the worst times imaginable. "Everybody is, I said.”  
  
“Everybody. Everybody? Even you?”  
  
“What,” he says. “Of _dying_? Or - ”  
  
“All right, yes. Yes, _that_. Even you.”  
  
Sirius shrugs, in the half-light.  This used to be second nature, bullying Remus into what he wants, but now, he's not so sure, and sometimes he thinks it’s just so awfully different now.  He doesn’t know where that easy satisfaction has gone.  It's as though one day, while he was kissing Remus’s mouth, or being thoroughly, soppily distracted by his elbows or his inability to stay awake while reading the _Prophet_ on Sunday night, that the satisfaction just got up and buggered off, and left him with all the old ability but none of the reason.  It makes answering hard, he thinks, when Remus is suddenly watching him with something, something approaching desperation. And it makes his gut boil thickly, a hot curl into his throat.  
  
“I - ” says Remus, suddenly.  
  
“It’s not about you,” says Sirius, sharp. “If you want it to be, you have to. No, fuck it. This isn’t. This isn’t about _that_.”  
  
_Isn't it?_ he thinks.  
  
Remus makes a strange sound, low in his chest. “You can’t - ” he says, jaw working. “If you can’t - either, how can you expect – ”  
  
Sirius kisses him: he reaches over the cartons of Indian curry and presses one palm flat to the floor by Remus’s thigh and leans over, all the way, to kiss him full on the mouth. This is because I want to, he thinks, not because the other choice is more frightening, not because the other choice means I have to speak to you. This is because I want to have my fingers in your hair and taste your stupid, smart-mouthed tongue and I want you to close your eyes and I _want_ to bite your neck and thighs, and I want to watch you when you come because I am everything you’re not and I want everything you are, and that’s it, he thinks. It’s _not_ because if I didn’t have you, I would have to be myself, by myself. That’s not the only reason why.  
  
Remus sits; his eyes are closed, and their lips are still wet with each other’s, cooling.  
  
"Why can’t you just," he mumbles, and his forehead is tight, brows pinched, skin very white and the heavy-wet, black glint between his teeth, where his lips part.  
  
“Shut up,” Sirius hisses, against his jaw.  
  
Remus presses a closed fist against Sirius’s chest, fingers just curling in the fabric of his collar when he pushes there; Sirius feels his weight settle back against his heels, sees Remus frowning at the convenient, heavy space over his shoulder.  
  
“I’m not - ” says Remus.  
  
“Don’t,” says Sirius, and he has his fingers wrapped around Remus’s wrist, because that is where they are. “I don’t care. You don’t fucking get to do this now.”  
  
Remus is stilled, there, and his eyes are fixed on the place where Sirius has his palm wrapped around Remus’s wrist and thumb, and he doesn’t look up when he speaks, when he says something, finally, that sounds vaguely faraway, like the echo off a drainpipe, or cold stone.  
  
“If you,” says Remus.  
  
“I mean,” says Remus.  
  
“I think I do, too. So. If,” says Remus.  
  
"Liar," says Sirius.  
  
Remus looks at him, in the silence, and Sirius drops Remus’s wrist, and picks at his food with his fork. It is the Long Look, the one that Remus gave in school, when he was eleven, when he knew the answer, _he knew it_ , but had been tripped in the corridor by Sirius Black for being a tatter-patched know-it-all of a half-breed. It is angry, the stuffy-squashed kind of angry that makes his mouth flat and pale, and his eyebrows heavy and his stupid, crooked nose jut into the air. It was ironic, thinks Sirius, then.  
  
This is ironic, thinks Sirius, now.  
  
Maybe I meant it, he thinks. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe let’s just wait until tomorrow and if everything’s still the same, after everything, maybe we’ll try and change it, then. Maybe I _should_ just sit here and watch you swallow it down, how it is to have that clump of _almost_ scrape at your throat and your guts and all your insides, because you _know_ you can’t say it, can you, he thinks.  
  
“Right, then,” says Remus.  
  
_Exactly_ , he thinks.  
  
"Well," says Sirius, firmly, and stands. His foot knocks over a half-empty cardboard carton; he'd rather stare at the scattered curry rice than Remus's hands or knees.  
  
"Go on," says Remus. “Go on. I’ve got it.”  
  
"Well,” says Sirius, and shoves his fists into his pockets – his hands are cold. “Tomorrow, then, yeah?"  
  
Remus rolls his eyes; there is the subtle dip of a head, the mess of hair that hides the redness in his face (the kind that lines the insides of the eyes, that signals flushed and mottled skin, hot under the surface). Should this, thinks Sirius, maybe this shouldn’t make you feel like you've been crying.  
  
"Go on, then," says Remus, again.  
  
Or maybe, he thinks, because he finally has Remus speechless and red-faced at his feet, this is why it should.  
  
  
---


	4. Above All, This Book Is Not Concerned With Poetry.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the beginning, the middle, and something of an end.

**PART IV** ****

**Above All, This Book Is Not Concerned With Poetry.**

 

 

The house is quiet. Everyone has gone: Mother to her sister's, Father to dinner with his deep-red robes with the pocket for the pipe. It is evening, and he sits on the edge of the bed and listens to the peculiar and fascinating way that Kreacher inhabits the negative space of a room. The underside fold of a velvet drape, the wick in the candleflame, the peripheral shadow in the corner of his own eyes, the dark ash in the fireplace scuttle. 

  
“I should,” he says. “I should have you teach me that.”   
  
Kreacher is material by the bookshelf. Not so much sudden as a compensation, a human recalculation: it must have  _always_ been there; it was only that I wasn’t paying attention, you see.   
  
“If you could,” says Regulus. “You would, I’m sure.”   
  
“Master Regulus,” says Kreacher, voice like eroded stone, cracked with age. “Is correct.”   
  
“Things are - ” there is a hiccough in the air where the words start out of him with no warning. There are three creatures in the world, thinks Regulus, over whom I have no control. My Brother, he thinks, My Lord, he thinks, and My Servant, he thinks. “Things are becoming. Difficult.”   
  
Kreacher has eyes like the inside of a shadow, a warmth unexpected, like mausoleum marble.   
  
“More difficult,” says Regulus. And he places his hands on his thighs, palms down, and he fixes his eyes on the wall, and he tries not to blink. There are strange things happening in the world, he thinks, and maybe, he thinks, if he looks away at that moment – that moment pre-decided that will be the point where everything veers into the future – that even more frightening than being left behind, will be that fact that he will be swept along with it, mute and paralyzed.   
  
“It’s not,” he says. “It’s not that I’m ungrateful.”   
  
“Yes, Master Regulus,” says Kreacher.   
  
“Sometimes,” says Regulus, and feels the trickle of sweat on the inside of his knee, pinning his trousers to his skin. “I wonder if.”   
  
Kreacher moves across the room on the slow pads of his tiny feet.   
  
“I’m sorry,” says Regulus. “It’s just. I think. I think there’s something happening that I will have to be sorry for.”   
  
“Master Regulus must never apologize to old Kreacher.” The voice rattles in Regulus’s skull, the wheeze of breath like his own heartbeat.   
  
There is the feel of heavy metal in his pocket – or it is only that the memory of it rests close against his thigh – shining, sibilant, healthy sinuous arcs and a small silver chain wrapped ‘round and ‘round and ‘round and ‘round like the oily pools and pushes of cold blood in the veins of his palm. He does not know what to think of it. He does not know what it means. He knows, I know, he thinks, I know that it means something? I know, he thinks, that I must trust myself?   
  
“Whatever happens,” he says. He is suddenly resolute, and it spikes like the shock of cold water up his spine. “Whatever happens. You mustn’t tell anyone. You mustn’t ever tell.”   
  
Two leathery fingers touch his wrist. In the stale air, it is the only sound.   
  
  


\--

  
   


They come through the woods, together, on the far edge of the hill, dark grey sky pressing down on them from above the bare, black branches. There is cold mud under their boots, remnants of dirty ice clumping to tree roots and in the divots of dead streams. It has been a mild winter: unassuming, if a little distracted most of the time. Sirius pauses to shake some mud off his heel, and thinks that maybe he has just completely _had it_ with pathetic fallacy, after all.  
  
Dearborn leans against a tree. “You act on instinct," he says, as if they had been in the midst of conversation all along, and not plodding through the cold, wet countryside for three quarters of an hour in utter silence.  
  
"Is that a question?" Sirius says, huffing into his cupped hands to warm his fingers.  
  
"Not at all," says Dearborn, evenly. "Perhaps, a statement, and invitation for your own particular insight."  
  
"And what's wrong with yours?" Sirius mutters, wiping his dripping nose on his sleeve, stepping up Dearborn's side; the church and the field are visible, now, through the trees.  
  
"Nothing, darling," says Dearborn, and pulls a white-linen handkerchief from the back pocket of his torn denim trousers; holds it out to Sirius without looking in his direction. "Only that it is generally insight, and not particularly instinct."  
  
Sirius crumples the handkerchief in his fist, out of irritation and nerves, and decides not to use it, after all.  In front of them, the woods are thinning, and the ground slopes gently upward to the hill, and the church defined by shadows and the blue-dark sky. It is more of a skeleton, than a church.  There is a single spire, prodding at the sky with knobby, broken shingles.  There is a row of darkened windows, a snaggled leer, the doors and leaded glass cling to their edges like sinews, like broken knees and ankles and elbows and shattered clavicles and the sound of the bell’s uvula, naked and impotent and scraping in the wind.  There is a scar in the earth, where people have walked over, and over, and over, to the top of the hill, to enter in.  There is a graveyard, expelled indelicately into the dead, straw grass and spindly bushes and strange, dark saplings, with a thin film of ice coating their trunks.  The town nestles underneath the hill, a lumpy gut with bloated rooftops and squat chimneys, with the streetlamps turned blue and heavy cream, in the dusk.  
  
“Dunno,” he says.  “Going on looks alone.”  
  
“Mm,” says Dearborn, and pushes away from the tree.  
  
“Dodgy,” says Sirius, vision narrowed, throat suddenly tight and his nerves teetering on the edge.  “Just a bit, isn’t it?”  
  
“There is that,” says Dearborn, quietly.  “There is that possibility.”  
  
Sirius crouches, hands tucked against his knees, trying to will some of the warmth and ease back into his body. His joints feel stiff, and there is something awful and corkscrewy going on in the back of his skull that makes him track the dark flashes in his periphery; makes him unable to focus on whatever it is that is in front of him.  He looks up at Dearborn, at the strange, regal profile and the high-cheekbones, the hair hardened upwards to five-inches tall, and the deepset eyes, and thinks that this is all quite a bit more somber than he would like, considering.  
  
“The portkey should be across the hill," says Dearborn, glancing down at him.  "The other side of the woods. If I confirm its position, I trust you'll be able to take care of yourself?"  
  
"Fuck off," grins Sirius, and draws his wand.  The immediate hum in his fingers makes the crackle in the back of his neck dim and withdraw, a little.  
  
"Ta, darling," smiles Dearborn, slipping off soundlessly behind him, back into the shadows and the grey dusk.  
  
Sirius huffs into his cupped hands, wand tucked between his knees; and he eyes the still and hulking form of the dying church, the way the bellies of the clouds overhead are lit with the full moon as it crests over the treetops.  
  
Three hours, he thinks, automatically.  
  
Fucking get this over with, he thinks.  
  
Fucking bad timing, he thinks.  
  
What _will_ they think of me, he thinks, and stands, and grins, _going off and saving the world, so selfish._  
  
And he _knows_ it’s considered bad form to do these sorts of things, now, at his ripe old age of Should-Know-Better, but his nerves are giddy up inside his skull, and his wrists and fingers are humming with the need to spark, to use his wand, because it’s only that he’s been thinking about it, all day.  He takes a few steps, carefully, testing the crackle and give of the frozen ground, and puts his hand on the crest of a broken gravestone to steady himself on a patch of ice, and gets a palmful of cold, slimy moss, instead.  
  
"Lovely," he mutters, and bends into the shadows, wiping his hand on his thigh as he slinks toward the church in a low crouch, knees grazing the cold earth, and wand tight in his palm.  The grass is taller, closer to the church, dark and coarse and unpleasant on his neck and jaw; he swats at it as he leans up against the crumbling stone, stretching upwards to peer into the low window, and he almost misses the flicker of light, the low voices.  
  
There are _people_ inside.  And, _shit_ , he thinks, simultaneously, _shit shit shit_ , as his nape crackles with the spark of sick realization, the crimple of a single footstep in the snow, behind him.  
  
The curse hits him in the back of his left leg before he can turn; it feels vaguely as if someone has sliced a very, very cold blade through the tendons of his knee, and he goes down before it even starts to hurt, scraping his temple and his forearms on the window ledge.  The pain shrieks up through his leg, starting somewhere down by his thigh, roiling up into his spine, and all he can think is _what what what is this fuck._ He swears in a sharp exhale, voice drained from him, his wand slipping in his sweaty palm, as he tries to roll to his back, elbows pressed against the frozen dirt, and pebbles sticking to his skin.       

  
“My Lord!” someone bellows, a deep and rattling male voice.  
  
“ _Confringo_ ,” he spits, his mouth watering with pain, feeling blinded.  His aim, he thinks, would be worth top marks, considering, except for the way the blast never seems to reach its target. There is the crack, the roar, and then it ripples, as if a small sieve in the world has sucked up all his power, and the air goes still and silent.  
  
And in the dark, there is a figure, with a body absorbed into the black grass and sky, and a strange and static face, moonwhite and two blotted gouges where the eyes should be.  
  
“Auror,” it says, “how unfortunate.  Did they really send you alone?”  
  
"Not an Auror," Sirius hisses, feeling the grin pull at his cheeks; teeth aching with the pain in his thigh.  
  
"Oh, no?"  The figure laughs, and raises its wand.  
  
"Also, not alone," says Dearborn, from behind the figure, in the dark, just before he swings the thick and heavy end of a tree branch into the back of its head.  There is a wet-sounding thud, the crack of bark and twigs and skull, and it crumples like a sheaf of black paper.  Dearborn looks at Sirius rather quizzically, head tilted, tree branch tucked neatly under his arm.  
  
"Effective, that," mumbles Sirius, too focused on his own thudding heartbeat to consider that maybe they may have actually managed to critically impair a very capable wizard with only a very big stick.  
  
"Of course, darling," says Dearborn.  "Though it appears we may have been set up."  
  
"Oh, rath _er_ ," Sirius snaps, forcing himself to standing, with one hand pressed to the back of his knee, forcing his leg to bend against the pain.  
  
Dearborn steps over the pile of robes and kneels to examine Sirius's thigh, leaning against the branch; he makes a thick and gentle huff in the back of his throat.  "I’m no healer," he says, glancing up at him with clear eyes and a straight set to his mouth.  “This will probably require some attention, Black.”  
  
Sirius just resists the urge to bat him away.  "Forget it," he says, sharply.  "The whole thing's fucked anyway. I don't think we should be so worried about getting what we came for, eh?"  
  
"Agreed," says Dearborn, and stands, looking out into the darkness.  "I doubt it exists. He shouted for him, did he not?"  
  
"He did," says Sirius, and feels the prickle on his nape again; his fingers twitch on his wand, he can see the flicker of light like low voices out of the corner of his eye, from inside the church and approaching with a flicker from the edges of the graves like a taunt.  
  
He said, he thinks, _My Lord_ \- _is that what does that mean_ , he thinks.  
  
"Yeah," he says, again.  
  
"We cannot go back the way we came," says Dearborn, firmly, turning away from the woods.  
  
"Why the hell not," hisses Sirius, grabbing at his shoulder.  "You realize the alternative is trying to grope our way through whatever trap they've _clearly_ planned for us?"  
  
"Darling," demurs Dearborn, "it’s too late.  We _have_ fallen into a trap, in its entirety.  The portkey is gone."  
  
"Gone," Sirius growls.  "Portkeys don't 'gone'.  Maybe, maybe they've forgotten to - we must have read the map wrong, before we left."  
  
Dearborn sighs, eyes blinking slowly; they open again with that odd and sleepy calm across them, like a film.  "They've found us," he says, evenly, and takes Sirius's arm by the wrist with the firm circle of his fingers.  "Can you run?"  
  
Sirius feels the grin pull at his face again, a laugh in the hollow of his throat where he's never quite felt one before.  "What, muffed your apparition exam?"  
  
Dearborn smiles, a flash of white teeth and an odd curl of his small, pale lips that sets Sirius to feel his hackles buried under his human skin, and how they rise.  "And take the fight with us?  You aren't really that dim, are you?"  
  
His skin goes hot, at that.  "Think I'm a better fighter when I'm insulted?"  
  
"I think I know you are," Dearborn says, and presses the tip of his wand between Sirius's eyebrows, and does not smile again, even when he murmurs and Sirius feels the cold drip like yolks down the back of his neck and spine, and his skin feels tighter, tingling.  
  
"What're you doing?" he hisses, even as he grips his own wand tighter in his sweaty hand.  
  
"They have reasons enough to want you out of their way," says Dearborn.  He turns, body low along the ruined wall of the church, approaching the corner with slow steps, speaking quietly out of the corner of his mouth.  "If that one was dim enough to believe you were an Auror, we can be rather confident that they won't recognize you without your own face."  
  
Sirius follows; he glances to the edge of the wood, to the graveyard, where the lights have disappeared - it makes his gut tight, suddenly.  "What about you - "  
  
"Conveniently - " murmurs Dearborn, shoulders pressed against the wall as he peers around the corner of the church. " - I have nothing to lose."  
  
That's not convenient, he wants to say - he doesn't know what it is, but he knows it's usually sort of miserable and looks rather good on paper and all, but doesn't hold much weight, and just makes it all the more difficult when you realize there are a few things, maybe, in life, that you would miss, even if they aren't your mind or your body or your warm bed or your cup of tea in the morning.  That's not convenient, he wants to say, when there is a _snap_ of a twig behind them, and Dearborn whirls, pressing down and back - hard - on Sirius's shoulder, so that he topples backwards through the remains of a shattered stained-glass window just as the curse spackles the stone where he was standing.  
  
" _Fuck_ \- " he hisses when he hits the ground, curling one arm over his head to shield his face from the shower of glass, even as he scrambles to get his footing, wand heavy and throbbing in his damp palm.  The soles of his boots scrape on the old wood and glittering shards, and his leg twinges as if there are cold teeth clamped on the back of his thigh, when he stands.  
  
The inside of the church is dark, as if it's sponged up all the shadows of the evening and the approaching night and hoarded them into the corners; the stone and the empty makes the echoes heavy (the clinking glass and scrape of his feet and his breathing).  The moonlight makes a ribboned carpet of white just off-center of the old aisle; the pews are haphazard and discarded and look like waves frozen in white-cap crest.  There is a lit candelabra at the very back of the hall: fresh wax and a sign so obvious of life it makes his heart shoot straight up into the top of his mouth, and he finds a wall behind him with his fingers, pressing his palm flat against it to get his bearings in the eerie quiet that blankets in-between the echoes.  
  
Outside, he hears the muffled thumps of movements, and there are shadows sweeping across what light the moon feeds in. He pauses, pressed back against the corner of the church, and lets himself breathe, lets his eyesight adjust and readjust, and pinprick at the room for any sign of movement.  He lets three curses and a protection rest at the very edge of his lips and tongue.  
  
"Chickie chickie," calls a voice, from the other end of the vaulted hall.  A woman's voice, pitched to the tone between laughter and disgust, and it's _so close_ to familiar.  He feels for a moment as if he might call out to her, as if it might _actually_ be someone whom he knew in the way that you know someone who you've seen in a sundress and drink fizzy lemonade, when they were seven years old and you were all together in the garden.  
  
"Ahhh, we can see you, chickie," sings the voice, and Sirius hisses, he can't help himself, it's _not_ her but it might as well be, and when they laugh, the anger lets him hear where the sounds begin, and he spits _stupefy_ violently at the shadows behind the pillars as he drops to his knees and scrambles behind the altar.  
  
A shriek, and the sound of cracking stone, and more voice from the rafters and the windows, and angry noises from outside.  There are only two of us, thinks Sirius, who on earth could be making all that bloody _fighting noise_?  A crackle and whip of magic, and another shattering of glass and cracking of wood rafters, and Sirius feels the ground _shake_ , and except for the fact that his heart is ricocheting off his ribs and his limbs are tingling with the urge to _move_ , it all sounds very odd and rushed and anticlimactic.  
  
“Another one!” someone shouts, and Sirius grins, gripping his wand as tightly as he can; shifting forward onto the balls of his feet to peer around the altar.  He can see shadows, and shattered bits of the night-dark outdoors peering through the broken windows, the holes in the roof and the walls, and he can hear the scrape of feet and swish of robes, and he sees Dearborn’s thin form and ridiculous hair melt back into the shadows of a pillar.  
  
" _Confringo_!" he shouts, again, hauling himself up above the altar, and this time there is a burst of fire, enough of a surprise to give Dearborn some cover.  
  
" _No_!" Someone screams, as he slumps back behind the podium again, a cold screech of pain in his leg. "No! _No_!"  
  
Dearborn ducks a retaliation as he skids to a stop beside Sirius; he is bleeding from the forehead, and Sirius can hardly breathe; there is ash coating his lungs, fire in his blood all the way to his fingertips; if he stands again, he will burst into flames, he knows.  
  
"What – " he hisses. "Fuck – "  
  
"Got him," Dearborn groans, grin creaking across his face, bloodless lips. "We – "  
  
There is another shriek, a splintering of wood and an acid-green slice of lightning over their heads.  
  
"Fuck – " Sirius chokes, mouth full of dust and dirt when he throws his arms over his head, chin tucked to his chest.  "Christ – Christ…"  
  
“We need to disengage, _now_ ,” Dearborn rasps, leaning in, his breath rattling in Sirius’s ears.  
  
“ _No_ ,” Sirius hisses, and does not know why; his head is pounding, there is the indelible streak of green through the rafters again. “No – no, we haven’t - ”  
  
In the moment that the curse spatters against the stone, Dearborn’s fingers close around his wrist, chest heaving with one, deep exhale.  “We will not emerge victorious,” he whispers, sharply, words running together in the sound of shattering stained-glass.  “They will kill us.”  
  
Oh, thinks Sirius, for one moment in time.  _I could stand now.  And be.  Be?_  
  
“Black!” snaps Dearborn, wand sparking with excess emotion.  
  
“Right,” Sirius growls.  “Right.  Let’s fucking _disengage_ , then.”  
  
“We need time,” Dearborn hisses.  “Time enough to keep them still, so we can run.”  
  
“Fine with me,” Sirius grunts.  “How many?”  
  
“Two outside we took down, two more before I was pushed inside, three left.”  
  
“Fine,” Sirius sniffs, feeling blood and hot magic on the air.  He pushes his hair back from his sweaty face, and feels the race of his own pulse against his forehead.  “Fine, then.  You take the left, I’ll take the right, and we’ll sweep to the center?  On three?”  
  
"Predictable," pants Dearborn, but he is grinning, again.  
  
_One_ , thinks Sirius - _here you were weak_.  
  
_Two_ , thinks Sirius - _here you were stupid_.  
  
" _Three_ ," hisses Dearborn.  
  
_Here you were helpless and wanted to cry_ , he thinks, and staggers to standing with Dearborn at his shoulder.  
  
And he realizes, after the first, terrorizing burst of light and noise and sweep of magic, after the crackle-and-snap of the aftermath, the sound of slumped, quivering, silence, after Dearborn grabs him by the collar of his jacket and growls - _Run_ \- hauling him through the dark of the aisles and into the dark of the winter night, that this doesn't count.  
  
He can't count this one, he thinks, because he wasn't afraid.  
  
They skid down the hill at a run, frost and pebbles scraping at their feet and calves and elbows and rucked-up shirts, and Sirius almost takes himself out on a streetlamp at the very edge of town, trying to keep most of the weight off his leg.  
  
It has begun to snow; padding their footsteps and leaving faint tracks, pressing against their hot skin and melting on their eyelashes, and Sirius, thinking of snowball fights, and the time he managed to get a hunk of ice the size of his _fist_ down the back of Remus’s trousers, and how it was absolutely thrilling to be the first person in the _world_ , probably, he thought, that thirteen-year-old-Remus had ever punched in the face.  
  
_It was worth it_ , he had said, in the hospital wing, where Remus had a thermometer under his tongue and a hot compress on his head, and Sirius had the kind of black eye that looked absolutely glorious after 24 hours.  And Remus said, _I think your stupid face broke my thumb_ , and Sirius showed him how to tuck it, a little (because James had showed him), with one hand against the inside of Remus’s elbow and the other on his closed fist, so there would be maximum face-breakage without many repercussions.  And Remus tried it out, in slow motion, so his knuckles bumped against Sirius’s jaw.  
  
_Seems all right_ , he had said.  
  
_Brilliant_ , Sirius had said.  _You’re going to be fearsome._  
  
_Er_. _No thanks,_ said Remus, and of course he knew why now, but at the time Remus had pointed at the mushy compress on his head, like an overstuffed beret, and said, _I’m working on perfecting awkward and ridiculous._  
  
_And_ _you are indeed very close to perfection_ , Sirius had said, solemnly, and Remus punched him in the arm, with his thumb tucked properly this time.  
  
And in the dull-heavy shadows of the village, where they keep to the edges of the buildings, with frost and cold stone grazing their fingers, and shreds of streetlamp-light skirting their faces, he thinks that Remus probably thought he was playing at it, then.  Probably, he thinks, I was, that.  
  
"Here," says Dearborn, suddenly, halting.  "Here, Black."  
  
"Oh, _lovely_ ," he breathes, feeling the wicked glee spread up his spine and into his teeth.  He is holding himself up with one hand against the corner of the building, panting; he is looking down the small alleyway to where an old motorbike is propped against the wall, sidecar half-covered with a tarpaulin.  "Now, _this_ \- this - is a proper getaway."  
  
"I'm very happy that you're happy, darling," says Dearborn with a distracted calm, looking over his shoulder.  
  
Sirius resists the urge to rub his hands together as he crouches beside it, snow soaking through the knees of his trousers, lifting one edge of the tarpaulin to run a palm over the belly of the engine.  
  
"Can you start it?" asks Dearborn, coming closer, footsteps squeaking in the fresh snow, and his breath hissing in soft, opaque clouds over Sirius's head.  
  
"I can get it to _sing_ if you give me two days," grins Sirius.  "But, given the - "  
  
"Time constraints," says Dearborn, pointedly, crouching beside him.  
  
"Right, that," murmurs Sirius, bending to the engine again, fingers on the cold metal.  "Give a us light, would you?"  
  
Dearborn has only just raised his wand when there is the sudden shift in scent, in the wind, and the fresh snow squeaks behind them at the entrance to the alley.  Dearborn whips around, elbow grazing Sirius's ribs, and he hisses, " _Black_!"  
  
And then something else entirely.  
  
It is like a lightning strike somewhere in the distance; Sirius sees the flash before he hears the words, before he can react. It starts and strikes so close to him he feels the burst of it graze his arm and cheek like a frozen knife; the air is cut through with the hiss and crackle, and the shadows are lit with the colour of it: green like the stripped skin of a sapling.  
  
The figure in black crumples to the snow, an afterthought.  The world continues to be just as it was, happily unconcerned with anything that is not the practiced irregularity of icicles dripping from the eaves, the precise shifts in the wind, the age and health of the heavy earth, and everything thinking about growing again, one day, underneath the crust.  And Dearborn has not lowered his wand.  
  
"Christ," says Sirius.  
  
Dearborn blinks, once.  "Move," he says, and turns him round with a hand to his shoulder.  
  
"Was that - " says Sirius.  
  
" _Be quiet_ ," snaps Dearborn.  
  
There is a harsh pause, where the moon and the streetlamps of the town light up the underbelly of the drifting snow, and Sirius bends to push the tarpaulin back, to snick his wand against the ignition and frown against the resistance of the thing.  He needs a wrench, or another wand, he thinks, or a full _Obliviate_ , thank you very much.  
  
"Please," says Dearborn.  
  
"Forget it," says Sirius.  "Can you hand me, er - "  
  
Dearborn gives him his wand, wordlessly, and it is still thrumming, and it sends a wave of involuntary nausea up his spine.  He doesn't look at it, when he uses it to probe into the mechanics: a little light here, a little double-jolt there, and he forces himself to see it all in black-and-white, you know, just in case, you know, he thinks.  
  
"Well?" says Dearborn, over his shoulder.  
  
"Hold on," Sirius says, frowns, and smacks the right side of the motorbike with an open palm, like the hindquarters of a horse.  It gives a startled sort of growl, exhaust belching from the tailpipe (and Dearborn takes a step back, warily), before it settles into a rangy, nervous purr of engine and gears, and Sirius grins.  
  
"Should do," he says, and looks up at Dearborn, and then sort of wishes that he hadn't, at all.   There is something wrong with Dearborn's eyes.   It is awful and awkward and he looks tired and old, and vaguely out-of-focus, as if he's not seeing Sirius crouched in front of him, or the snow under his feet, or the impatient motorbike and trundling, happy sidecar, or the light and shadows, any of it at all.  And because Sirius looks at him, and because he can't stand it, he can't help himself; he speaks.  
  
"What about that," he says, and Dearborn turns his head and looks at the black lump in the snow as if it were a tiny bird, caught somewhere in a blinding-sort-of-blue sky, squinting to determine if it were real, actually, or maybe just a speck of dust caught by the wind, much closer than he'd thought.  
  
"Leave it?" Dearborn says, finally.  
  
"Leave it," echoes Sirius, feeling a bit of numbness in his fingertips.  
  
"We can't really afford to lose any more time," says Dearborn, in an oddly thoughtful voice, and he looks at Sirius again, and there _is_ something dreadfully wrong with his eyes (not his _face_ , but his eyes), and Sirius squints at him.  
  
"Don't bother, darling," says Dearborn, and pockets his wand.  
  
So Sirius doesn't.  
  
And it's a bumpy ride to London.  After all, he thinks, that last time he charmed any sort of Muggle motor to fly, he was fifteen, and it was a lawnmower in the garden of Peter's surly neighbour with the fat, ugly cat, in Lewisham.  (It flew, he remembers, and it was brilliant for a while, all before it ended rather badly for the cat.)   This one, it gets into the air easy enough, but seems to have trouble flying straight with the sidecar thoroughly distracted by the clouds and birds and the black tufts of trees below them, and Sirius has to keep dipping to the right in order to get the bloody thing to pay attention.  
  
The moon is a swollen crest below them, still close to the horizon; a fat, pearly nudging into the sky.  It looks terribly pleased with itself tonight,  Sirius thinks, and squeezes his palms on the handlebars, and revs the motorbike a little harder than he'd meant to, and the sidecar gives a nervous jiggle.  He glances at Dearborn, to apologize, but he's not noticed, Sirius realizes, and so he keeps his mouth closed.  
  
He wants to ask why, but he hates that fucking, fucking question, he knows.  The worst things in the world come after _why_ , he thinks.   The things that make people cry or laugh until they can't breathe, or hate until their skin goes bloodless with rage, or go silent and red in the face, they all come after why, he thinks.  If everyone wasn't so bloody worried about rationalizing, he thinks, well.  
  
And over the north edge of Surrey, when the clouds get thick and dewy, and he feels natal snow gathering on his lips and eyelashes, and his fingers are cold, even through a warming charm, he starts praying that Dearborn will fall asleep in the sidecar, because his eyes are still open, and they are still all wrong.  
  

  
\--  
  
  

“I need to go,” he says, again.  “James.  James, we _need to go can’t this wait_.”  
  
“No,” says James, in the way that he does which means he’s ignoring Sirius, so Sirius smacks across the back of the head with an open palm, as hard as he can manage.  
  
“ _Christ_ ,” James spits, turning on him.  “I said _no_ , yeah?  Sit the hell down, already.  It’s only your leg is about to shrivel up into your ribs, _sit down_.  You can't -- let's just have a look at it, all right?”  
  
“It’s fine.”  
  
James _stares_ at him.  
  
“It’s fine,” he says again, feeling a thick, hedgy sort of heat gather at his cheeks and making him furious, again, for some reason.  “I said.  D’you think we could go, now?”  
  
“I don’t know what kind of help you think you’ll be to him like this,” James mutters, turning away again.  He is bent over the sink, they are all three crammed into the kitchen of the Potter's London house, because Sirius’s forehead was bleeding all over the hook-rug in the front corridor, and James got it all over his hands trying to find the place he’d been cut, so he could stop the bleed and then go about beating Sirius senseless, and Dearborn had wisely tottered past them into the kitchen and passed out in the first chair he saw.  
  
“Well, it’s better than nothing,” Sirius snaps.  
  
“Bloody well _isn’t_ ,” James growls, and throws a cool, damp, cloth at him.  “Look, Pete’s promised to meet him up in the morning, make sure everything’s all as it should be and that he’s had something to drink or eat, what he can keep down.”  
  
Sirius swipes at his forehead with the cloth, and glares at Dearborn’s slumped form: the lax, white hands folded across the table, the regal profile and heavy lashes, weak and smudged.  
  
“What,” says James.  
  
Sirius narrows his eyes, sharply, but the way James has his chin cocked high and his knuckles braced tight and white on the counter, means that he’s already figured it out.  
  
“What, nothing,” says Sirius.  “It _happens_.”  
  
“What,” says James again, flatly.  “It _happens_ , it does not just _happen_ , you – Christ, listen to you.   _Murder_ , and you think, what - that they're saying, 'oh, sorry mates, it just _happened_ ' when they're blowing up towns of Muggles?”  
  
Sirius snorts, and tightly balls the damp cloth between his hands.  “It wasn’t me, all right, he just - ” he jerks his chin at Dearborn’s shadowed, slumped shoulders, and white forehead.  “He just - had to, it was - you know, out of nowhere, the bastard came out of nowhere, all right?  It doesn’t _change_ anything, all right, it’s not like we invented the bloody curse right there and then.”  
  
James pinches the bridge of his nose, and mutters something strangled and impolite into the cup of his palm, and Sirius chooses to ignore it entirely, because he feels like the frost and snow and ash have conspired, and swollen his throat closed and his mind too thick to form that kind of thought.  
  
“What the – “ James sighs, finally, and presses the heel of his hand to his forehead when he looks up again.  “Look, Pads – I should've. ”  
  
“Don’t say it,” he growls.  “I’ve let you had all the heroism up ‘til now, haven’t I.”  
  
James looks at him flatly, fingers curling in his hair (a reminiscent bad habit, tug-musses melted slowly into loose fingers, and only now and then, after all).  
  
“Most of it,” Sirius amends, and he is so grateful, _so grateful_ it makes him sick, that he has made James laugh again, even a little.  
  
“Will you fucking get that looked at, then?” James says, nodding to Sirius’s leg, which he hasn’t bothered to look at, considering it might just make the pain a little bit worse, since that how it is, when you can see the things you’ve only just been imagining up until that point when you open your eyes. Sharper, he thinks, and never quite how you thought it would be, whatever that means.  
  
"I mean it," says James.  "That wasn't - you don't know what that jinx was."  
  
“Tomorrow,” he says.  He thinks, stubbornly, it would do him some fucking good to run around in the open air and bite something on the neck (knowing it’d be all right, in the morning).  “On my fucking  _honour,_ all right?  I’ll go tomorrow, but.”  
  
James frowns, but he pushes off from the counter, and Sirius follows him to the front door, shoulders bumping.  
  
“I’ll get Sleeping Beauty to Dumbledore, eh,” says James, at the doorway, glancing back into the kitchen, where Dearborn is still slumped and oblivious (and still a murderer, thinks Sirius).  The air is cold - the night-air cold - and it scrapes on their hot cheeks and gets swallowed down their swollen throats.  It hasn’t been snowing here, and the ground makes sharp deadwinter sounds under their feet.  
  
“Want me to hold onto that motorbike for you?” says James.  
  
Sirius shrugs. “Why not.”  
  
“Look,” says James, and pauses, heels scraping in the frozen dirt, arms crossed and hands tucked in to keep them warm.  
  
“I need to go,” says Sirius.  The moon hangs low in the sky like a thick, fat soap bubble; so bright it blots out the stars and the London streetlamps.  
  
“If you’re all right,” says James; glances at him.  “I mean, I could.”  
  
“Go be the good boy and give the report, already,” Sirius scoffs, and rolls his eyes.  His hands are cold; he stuffs them into his pockets.  “And tell Pete I can handle him myself, eh.”  
  
James pushes his spectacles up his nose, and exhales slowly.  He leans against the fence post at the end of the path, body blocking the gate, and fixes Sirius with a heavy-lidded stare.  
  
“Oh, fuck you, Potter,” Sirius mutters.  There's always some new look, he thinks; recently James’s face has become more measured in its generosity: rationing his smiles and his skepticism and his stupid, huffing laughter, and it makes Sirius wary and furious, all at once, to have to believe that even James, he thinks.  Even James.  Of course he _understands_.  Of course he is _aware_.  But to look like this now, and because of it.  
  
James shrugs, evenly.  “If it makes you feel better,” he says.  “But it won’t get rid of - you know.  Any of this.”  
  
“I fucking know,” Sirius snaps.  “All right?”  
  
James sighs, and pushes off from the gate, and when they are face-to-face like this, Sirius realizes, they are still the same height, like they always have been (except for the first two weeks in school, when James was a half-foot shorter than _everyone_ , and for 23 days in third year, when Sirius had to endure an inch deficiency, and the knowledge that James had grown hair on his chest without him).  
  
“Just,” says James.  “That fucking leg, okay?”  
  
He raises a hand, and rests his palm on the back of Sirius’s neck.  His fingers are cold, and his specs are slightly crooked, and Sirius presses the knuckles of his closed fist against James’s chest, because he is tired and injured and angry, and knows, clearly, that James has seen worse.  
  
So he closes his eyes.  So he says yes, yeah, all right, silently.  So when he brushes past James, through the gate, he knows James will not be looking for him to have to know when exactly he shifts into the dark, sensory comfort of his animal body, and takes off at a pounding run, towards where the moon threatens the horizon.  
  
  
\--

  
 

He changes too soon.  
  
The Wolf has been whining, high in the back of its throat, heavy paws and nails clicking, scraping on the wood as it paces, its spine shocked with strange and sporadic shudders.  Its hind legs give out under it, and it pants heavily, huge head bowed, and its body quakes, the high blades of its shoulders slicing up into the air, and he doesn’t know why, but he changes, and he is Sirius again, crouching in the dark dust of the Shack with his body aching and his head distilled to the point of insanity, with the night.  
  
He has changed too soon, he realizes.  It is not yet Remus, and it makes a throbbing, gurgling growl as it lifts its head and stares at him with the fur slowly drawing back from its curling lips and snout, with eyes that have gone fully black, like gaping holes, and cheeks with the high curve of bone suddenly exposed, pearly and wet and shining.  Its jaws hang open, teeth too long for its mouth and tongue, glistening and purple, and its shoulders heave, again.  
  
Sirius feels the spasms through the floorboards, under his human fingers, and his runs-in-the-wild scraped human palms. He has not found his breath yet, and the Wolf has already smelled the slow seep of blood from the gash on his forehead and the tender flesh of his bruised thighs and ankles.  It struggles to its great and standing height again, like a drunkard, the crackle and pop of a slowly resetting spinal cord making it loll its misshaping face upwards, backwards, against the pain.  
  
And again, from the shadows: _I could stand now?  And be?_  
  
“Moony?” he whispers.  
  
It screams at him, when it lunges for his throat.  
  
It catches him at the shoulders; the force of it slams him back against the wall and knocks the air out of his body and sends splinters and dust and spiders and rotted seedpods rattling down onto them from the rafters, and there are two heavy forelegarms squeezed down against his collarbones, and the weight of an entire coiled, leaping bellychest over his thighs.  His body won’t react, he is too slow, too solid in his perfect, whole form to compete, and there is the hot and acrid breath against his jaw and his ear and the heaving, scraping, points of the teeth drag slide like needles along his throat, _just_ , _just_ , and there is saliva pooling at the aching curve of his shoulder.  
  
He hears the shatter of bone just against his ear; he _feels_ it when the jaw sinews pressed against his cheek snap suddenly, and the body against him is jolted backwards, upwards.  There are hands gripping at his shoulders now, ten hard points of fingers and two firm palms _pressing_ down as the body on him arches, curls, the ripple of a reforming spine forcing the boy-shaped head _down_ , bent and panting loudly.  
  
Just as Sirius's breath comes back to him in a terrifying _thwack_ of air into his lungs, he sees through watering eyes (feels against his hips and thighs and belly) the moment where Remus is forced into being: bloody and shaking and blind.  Sirius reaches for a choking reference point; because he cannot feel his own body, he reaches for the face above his and presses fingerpads against the skin, against the hairless cheek, the jaw, this temple, his open mouth, against his bared teeth (flat and impotent).  
  
Sirius realizes he has never seen this with human eyes.  He has never, never, felt skin this new.  
  
Remus’s arms quiver, and collapse, and the scrape of his elbows on the wood of the wall behind Sirius’s back is the loudest sound in the world, thinks Sirius, because even the Shack has gone utterly still, because even the night is terrified.  
  
Remus does not have a pulse.  His hands are caught, wet and limp, behind Sirius’s neck.  His crooked legs are wedged against Sirius’s thighs.  His forehead is an uncommitted weight; it is pressed to Sirius’s shoulder because it is simply where it fell.  And time is caught, stripped and humiliated and hung from the rafters by the bleeding neck, and everything waiting for this tiny lump of guts and bones to raise its head, to expand its lungs, to brush the dust and scabs and soapy pus from its knees and stand and say, oh, well, there was that, then, and now how about some tea?  
  
He does not care, anymore.  _I don't care I don't care_ , he thinks, anymore.  He wraps his arms around Remus’s ribs and back, tight enough that he feels the squeezing pain in his own muscles, and leans into him, pressing his face into Remus’s slumped neck, and slack jaw, and he curls them up together.  He curls them up together, and thinks that maybe if he presses hard enough into Remus’s body, their skin will let some of the missing life pass through.  
  
It was easier before I knew the taste of your mouth, thinks Sirius.  This was easier before I wanted you _all the time_.  And now and now and now, he thinks, and now I don’t know anything at all.  
  
 

\--  
  
 

_That's disgusting, he said.  How are you eating that._  
  
_I'm hungry, Regulus said.  I'm sorry._  
  
_You were vomiting up your spine yesterday, he said.  How can you be eating that._  
  
_I'm sorry, said Regulus again, with his mouth full of cold, badly-cooked lamb and boiled cabbage._  
  
_You know she'd have them make you something else, he said, sighing, lifting the dust from the table in a thick outward plume.  You should just ask, idiot._  
  
_I'm not supposed to be out of bed, said Regulus._  
  
_If you're well enough to eat my bloody Easter dinner, you prick, you're well enough to hold your own against that harpy, he snapped.  Christ._  
  
_Regulus frowned at him.  Sirius, he said._  
  
_I didn't want it anyway, he said.  Shut up._  
  
_Regulus poked his fork into his plate again, pressing the flat of it into the mushed lump of cabbage, keeping his eyes on the table, his face still pale, his ears still too big for his head, his hair still a little damp at the nape and the temples, and his skin just this side of ashy._  
  
_I'm glad you came home, Regulus said._  
  
_I told you to shut it, he said.  And he paused.  The ceiling above their heads creaked with footsteps, with the rustle of silk and the hum of life in the pipes and walls.  They said you were going to die, anyway, he said._  
  
_Regulus frowned again.  Why would they say that?_  
  
_I don't know, probably because you looked like you were, bloody proper.  His ears were hot, and he wanted to punch something, because Regulus was a complete idiot, most of the time._  
  
_Don't swear, said Regulus.  Please._  
  
_Disgusting, he muttered, because it was the only thing in his head._  
  
_It didn't feel like I was, said Regulus._  
  
_How the hell would you know?_  
  
_I don't know, said Regulus, who is thirteen years old, and an idiot.  How could you not?_  
  
_What, he said._  
  
_I think you know, said Regulus.  When you die, I think that you must know that you are?_  
  
_You still have a fever, he said.  Shut up and eat._  
  
_He insisted, he thought, the next day, when he was on alone on platform nine-and-etcetera, hands stuffed in his pockets and his scarf wound tight around his neck (though it could have been James's, or Remus's; they kept getting them all mixed up and then Remus would complain when he found his again, and the fringe ends had been all twisted together, because Sirius apparently had a number of benign bad habits that were somehow unaccountably irritating, like chewing on borrowed quills, or folding down the corners of books, or coiling the fringe ends of his scarf between his fingers, until they got all tangled)._  
  
_But he insisted, he thought.  He was so close, I thought, to well-you-know-that, that's what they said, and all he had to do was stand and say, sorry chaps, no, not today._  
  
_And that was that, he thought.  Is that how it works?_  
 

  
\--

  
 

He wakes when he feels the first pump of blood again, against his lips.  Remus’s body is shifting, and he can feel Remus’s lungs rushing open with harsh, hot air, and Remus’s ribs creaking, again, and Remus struggling against him, in the dawn.  A blind and flailing hand clenches to his hair and pulls, and _no_ he hisses.  “Ah --- no.”  
  
Stop it, Sirius snaps.  Stop it stop it, it’s fine, it’s fine, you’re fine, it’s all right, _stop it_.  
  
Remus's chin drops, and he is breathing hard, thin chest heaving, and his raw fingers flex in Sirius’s hair.  “Wh - ” he whispers.  “No – I th’ght.”  
  
“It’s fine,” says Sirius, and encircles Remus’s wrist with his fingers, slowly.  
  
_What have you done_ , hisses Remus, suddenly, and presses the heel of his hand to Sirius’s chest; he closes it into a fist; his eyes are open and feverish and blind.  
  
“Nothing,” says Sirius.  “I was just.”  
  
“I know you,” says Remus, clearly, voice like the naked bell.  
  
“What,” whispers Sirius, and feels his gut curl upwards like a wad of burning parchment, a heavy helpless flare.  
  
_Sirius?_ Remus hisses, again, and squeezes his eyes shut, as if he is just feeling the steady ache of his reformed body, the crusting of blood over his temples and eyebrows and under his fingernails and tongue.  _Padfoot is that – I can’t_ he whispers, with the even, logical panic of the utterly mad.  
  
Somewhere, somewhere in his body, which is usually resilient, which is usually stubborn about these sort of things, it is too much.  
  
“Please,” he chokes, suddenly.  “No. Please be all right.”  
  
And he feels the slow squeeze at his throat, the thing that makes him weak and makes him say things that feel burning and wet on his tongue and teeth.  
  
Remus turns his face upwards, his hands find the ridge of Sirius’s shoulders, thumbs fitting into the joint-grooves.  “I,” he says.  
  
“It’s fine,” says Sirius.  “It’s fine, I swear,” he whispers, into the dark of Remus’s mouth.  “I wasn’t afraid.”  
  
Remus presses his fingers to Sirius’s face, between them, red and wet and warm.  He is touching his temple, his cheek, his brow, his knotted jaw; his thumb presses against Sirius’s teeth.  A bridge: because they think they cannot speak.  
  
 

\--  
  
 

The next morning, Remus is halfway through making coffee when he pauses, and coughs blood into the sink.  
  
“Christ,” says Sirius, and there are coffee grinds _everywhere_. “Stop that.”  
  
Remus gives him a baleful sort of glare over his shoulder, and he has the back of his wrist pressed against his mouth (but Sirius can see the smear on his chin).  
  
“Dreadfully sorry,” croaks Remus, and holds out his other hand, fingers crooked, face tilted away. “If you’d be so kind?”  
  
“Christ,” says Sirius again, and pushes away from the table with a wad of handkerchief in his hand (he had found it in the pocket of his trousers, that morning, and wasn’t really thinking of using it to wipe away jam smears or dripping honey, really; and it wasn't that he was thinking of stuffing it deep into the top drawer of Remus’s chest of drawers, burying it under lonely single socks that no one wore, anymore, it wasn’t, it’s just that he had it in his pocket, he thinks).  
  
“Can’t even suffer properly, can you,” he mutters, pushing Remus’s hands away, pressing the cloth against Remus’s chin and mouth.  “That was disgusting.”  
  
Remus lifts one eyebrow, and Sirius dabs roughly at the edge of the quirked smile.   “Bother. And I was going for fearsome.”  
  
“Pathetic,” Sirius sighs, and tosses the pink-stained cloth into the sink, running the tap.  “Could have told you that wouldn’t work.”  
  
“Sorry,” says Remus, although it sounds rather different, this time, with his thumb wiping along his bottom lip, consciously.  
  
“All right?” says Sirius.  
  
“There’s something wrong with your leg,” says Remus, suddenly, instead.  “What - ”  
  
“Nothing,” says Sirius.  “Tell me you’re finished bleeding out of all your holes for the time being, and get the fuck back into bed.”  
  
“ _That’s_ disgusting,” says Remus, pointedly, and makes no move for the bedroom.  “When you put it that way.”  
  
Sirius tries not to put any sort of thought into the fact that _standing_ is only making the nerves in his thigh scream all the way up into his spine, because Remus is watching him shrewdly with his bright, bruised-looking eyes, and the split in his lip gone black-dark-scab, again.  He tries not to put any thought into the fact that Remus will not mention that he became human over Sirius’s body last night, that he was re-skinned in Sirius’s palms.  Sirius tries to imagine that Remus has no fucking clue.  
  
“I don’t,” he says, and is still so enthralled, he realizes, even with his bare feet sticking to the floor and the knowledge that Remus’s tongue is tasting iron on the inside of his teeth.  “I don’t _mind_ , I’m rather fond of all your bad habits, all right, but for the good of the sausages, or something, I don’t know, try not to vomit all over the kitchen.”  
  
“Fair enough,” says Remus, bending over the sink again to flex his fingers clean under the cold water, and he is smiling.  
  
_It’s_ not _fair_ , thinks Sirius.  _Fuck you,_ fuck you, _you have no idea what fair_ is _._  
  
“Go on,” he says.  
  
“Just an hour, maybe,” says Remus, and presses a palm to Sirius’s forearm, when he slips past – flat and sweet and carefully unconcerned.  “All right?”  
  
“Sure,” says Sirius.  “Sure.”  
  
And when he hears the snick of the door, closing - when he hears the whirring silence scuttle up into all the corners of the flat again, when he looks down at his own hands and his own fingers, and his wrists, and sees that they are somehow clean, somehow absolutely spotless - he takes one deep breath.  
  
He takes one deep breath, and there is air in his lungs.  
  
And his body, he realizes, it doesn’t know what to do with it, with the rib-crushing rush of it, the acrid choke of coffee and cold water, and blood and Other People’s skin and sweat, and all the acts of living.  
  
And – because there is someone sleeping – he makes certain to have both his palms clamped tightly over his mouth and nose, to catch every bit of sound, when he takes a nice long moment with his forehead pressed to the cool surface of the counter, and screams himself hoarse.  
  
---


	5. The Subject of It Is War, And The Pity of War

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the beginning, the middle, and something of an end.

 

**PART V:  
The Subject of It Is War, And The Pity of War**

The motorbike begins to act rather odd as they round the crest of some low, March-white clouds in the outskirts of Surrey, and Sirius swears (words chapping his lips), because if things go off like they did the last three times, there is a dark and frozen pond beneath them, and he doesn’t, honestly, really relish that thought much at all.

"All right?” calls James from up ahead; his broom swings around, hitting Sirius with a rush of cold, moist air.  
  
“Fine, she’s fine - ” he shouts, and the motorbike gives a heavy, resentful-sounding cough in response.  
  
“Doesn’t much sound like,” James calls, wheeling up and back. “You want we should put down and you can - ”  
  
“Go on,” Sirius snaps, swinging an arm wide, and giving the motorbike’s handles a distracted squeeze as it bucks. “Go on, I’ve got her!”  
  
“Do not,” James laughs. “She’s – oop, ha ha ha, pull up, you idiot! Pull up!”  
  
“Fucking - ” he nearly wrenches his arms from their sockets, leaning full-back in the seat as the motorbike bucks a twisted sort of spiral in the air, before deciding to lilt sadly, gracefully, directly towards a cluster of dead-bare treetops.  
  
Sirius hears James yell something else entirely unhelpful, before he ducks his face behind an elbow and holds on furiously through the air-shattering snap of branches, the scrape of metal and the smell of exhaust, the coughing, struggling motor, and the hard, buffeting whip of twigs against his face.  
  
He thinks, oddly, that that bird just better shut it’s fucking, fucking mouth, before he realizes that the worst has passed, and it’s not a bird because it’s fucking March, and it’s just the sound of his ears ringing, because he’s smacked his head into a great and tremendously solid tree trunk.  
  
“You,” he says, to the motorbike, which is purring sadly. “Ow – _god_ – are just _awful_.”  
  
"You've had a bloody month to work on that thing," James chokes, still laughing, as he pulls the broom up to hover just by Sirius’s aching head. "Where's the pay-off, exactly?"  
  
"It's the sidecar, the sidecar!" Sirius spits, grunting when he pulls his arm free from between the handlebars and a knotted mass of broken branches. "It doesn't know what way is up-like, without it!"  
  
James wipes his eyes with the heel of his hand, still shaking, and Sirius considers reaching out and whacking him headfirst against the tree trunk by the tail of his broom.  
  
"It's just heartsick, mate, give it some time," James grins, and Sirius throws a twig at him.  
  
"Fuck, just - ” Sirius tries to extract a leg, and feels his jeans snag and rip along the hem, the scrape of bark against his ankle. “Augh – augh, fuck, didn’t this used to be a hell of a lot easier?”  
  
“I’ve no _idea_ what you mean,” says James, with a sickly sweet tilt of his head.  And he is still bobbing on his broomstick, golden and rakish and able to execute a vertical figure-eight into a Prunestein Half-Twist Feint, _with no hands_ , and Sirius is suddenly old (and possibly drunk, possibly not, possibly just hung-over, possibly just a miserable, stubbled sort of failure), and covered in motor-oil and twigs.  
  
“I hate you,” says Sirius. “You’re going to be insane with jealousy when I bend her into submission.”  
  
“Ahh, bated breath!” sings James, and takes his broom into a lazy spiral toward the still-frosted earth. “Shall I call for - ”  
  
“If you do anything other than shutting your fucking mouth,” Sirius spits, and almost topples out of the branch as he finally wrenches his ankle free. “I swear - ”  
  
“Oop,” James grins, head tilted upwards, his specs glinting white against the sun. “Carefully now, pumpkin!”  
  
“Some mate, you’re all pet-names and generally unhelpful all ‘round, and I’ve just hit my head on an immovable fortress of _tree_ ,” says Sirius, because things _are_ awfully vague and woozy, all of a sudden.  
  
“For worse or better?” calls James.  
  
“I could _die_ ,” says Sirius, and crosses his eyes at the ground below when it threatens to rock out beneath him. “Wouldn’t you be sorry then.”  
  
James makes a tight, angry sort of noise, and says, “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” which is quite odd, considering Sirius had been _pumpkin_ shortly before.  
  
“What?” he calls. “What – are you - ”  
  
“Nothing,” says James, and squints up at him again, broom in his hand. “Nothing, look – _here_ , all right, just shut up.”  
  
And James gives the broom a little toss, the flick of his wrist and his wand sending it up to hover gently in the air beside Sirius’s branch and the now-rather-peeved motorbike.  And Sirius can still see all the places that this broom is _James’s_ : the palms grooves, worn and slick, the snicks at the tail end where James’s boots would scrape and dig when he kicked from the stirrups, the slight line by the head where it was broken, once. Remus said he’d managed to repair it for James’s birthday, although honestly it came out later that it had been Evans all along. (Remus said they should have known better, his charm work was _never_ that good, honestly, she just didn’t want them to know, they would have made A Thing About It.)  
  
“To _day_ , Princess Loretta, if you please?” shouts James, and Sirius drops an icicled-acorn on him on purpose, when he scoots sideways onto the broom, and takes a long curve to the edge of the pond.  
  
James is still squinting up into the tree as he lands, one hand shielding the sun from his eyes, the other reaching out to grab the tail of the broom as Sirius finally gets two feet on the frosted ground.  
  
“Nice bit of work, there.”  
  
“The sidecar, I’ve told you,” Sirius sighs, shaking strips of cold bark and dead leaves from his sleeves. “It’ll only be one or two more runs before she’s used to it.”  
  
“Not like this, I hope,” James sighs. “We can’t all baby-sit your deathtrap training regiments, not every day.”  
  
Sirius tugs a twig out from underneath his collar, and frowns at it. “And your blindingly positive attitude is definitely the remedy.”  
  
“Speaking of remedy,” says James.  
  
“Shut _up_ , I went, already,” says Sirius. He hadn’t. He is cold and frustrated and very good at lying, and tired of everyone fawning over him like some invalid, just because he was silly and stupid enough to go and get hit in the leg with a silly, stupid _jinx_.  
  
“Did not, when,” sniffs James, leaning back on the broomstick, arm hooked around it.  
  
“Last, er. I don’t know, last week, some time,” he says, and rolls his eyes.  
  
“Never did,” says James. “McGonagall came by anyway, and Lily asked her, and she said Poppy had the stuff and the tests ready all week, and you never showed.”  
  
“Your wife’s a bloody rat,” says Sirius, and ducks the business end of the broomstick that comes swinging at him.  
  
“Stop playing about,” James says, sharply. “Nerve damage, they said, you’re - ”  
  
“There’s not a damage about it,” Sirius snaps, and bounces a fist off his thigh, for demonstration, for good measure. He is fine and flexible and not the least bit concerned because if there’s no scar, than what’s the _use_. “They were worried about a stupid _jinx_ , just worried, it wasn’t definite anyway, and it’s fine, it’s been fine for weeks, so stop being such a cuntrag about it.”  
  
“Oh, for – ” James crouches down by the edge of the lake, scooping up a palm-full of half-melted snow. “ _Fine._ ”  
  
“No time for moping, more manly problems await!” Sirius says, grandly, generously, and tries not to be peeved that James doesn’t look up at his sweeping, masterish gesture toward the trapped and shivering motorbike.  
  
James mumbles something about _problems_ , and Sirius thinks very strongly about that lump of ice and James’s exposed neck.  
  
“What,” he sighs. “What, I _hate_ that word.”  
  
"How's the furry one," says James, for some odd reason, because it is an awful change of subject. “The furry _problem_.”  
  
"Fine," lies Sirius. "He's fine, he's sleeping it off, isn’t he. That's an awful change of subject."  
  
"Mm, well aware," says James, and shrugs, glancing backward over his shoulder. "I'm not particularly interested in sequitur at the moment. What with you having just bashed your poor head into a tree, and being all un-damaged, entirely."  
  
He pulls a twig from his hair, and winces when it tugs at a snarl.  "My _poor head_ is immune to your shoddy tactics.”  
  
“O-ho,” James snorts.  
  
“My _poor head,_ ” mutters Sirius, flicking the twig away.   “Has nothing to do with any of this – this."  
  
"This war," says James, quite bluntly.  
  
"Fuck you," spits Sirius, always so bloody murderous when James uses that _tone_.  “All right, just.”  
  
“Oh, stuff it,” James snaps.  “D’you _really_ want to just keep on like this? Honestly, you’re – it’s a mess, you’re making _a ruddy mess_ of it, you can't go promising people things, and then go and get all banged up because you wanted to take a little _risk_ for the sake of -- fuck, what was the _point_?”  
  
Sirius stares, the edges of his vision going vaguely red and blurry – though he imagines that may be a concussion and altitude sickness and not actually a murderous urge to pulverize his best mate into small, smoldering bits.  
  
“Beg your _pardon_ ,” he hisses.  
  
“I’ve had it,” says James, sharply, standing.  "Enough, I've had _enough_.  See?"      
  
“You’ve had _something_ ,” mutters Sirius, and squares himself off to face the pond in preparation for a tremendous, gratifying sulk.  
  
“It doesn’t work this way,” says James, voice clear and precise, and Sirius feels the space between his shoulder-blades start to crinkle horrendously, which means James is giving him The Very Serious and Unpleasant Grown-Up Face.  "You have to be _careful_."      
  
“I don’t – ” he starts.  
  
“I’ve fucking _had_ it, I said.  Lily won’t barely let me touch her for fear of _babies_ appearing and mucking things up, and people are _disappearing,_ and you're still hoping that I won't fucking notice?"  
  
"The hell - " he starts, rounding on James, fists balled.  
  
James shoves at his shoulder with one hand - with his elbow locked, which means he's not thinking very clearly, considering.  "You prick - I don't need _protecting_ ," he growls, and he shoves again.  "Worry about your fucking, fucking _self_!"   
  
Sirius tries to catch at his fist and grabs at his wrist instead, not really sure if he's shoving James back or pulling him forward.  "What the hell do you know about what you need?" he growls, voice scraping on his throat because the words are fast and heavy.  "You'd give up everything for her, in a bloody _second_ , wouldn't you?  You know you would, you - and!  She’s right – for your fucking family, too – why the hell should she give you a kid, you'd just as soon put a bloody big sign around your neck: _Hullo Yes Ready And Willing To Die For Greater Good_!"  
  
"Because _I love her,_ " James snaps.  "That's exactly it, you daft - "  
  
"Yeah," Sirius hisses, fingers squeezing on his wrist.  "That's it, _exactly_."  
  
James is silent; his face is sort of red, and his specs are crooked.  
  
"So," swallows Sirius, suddenly sort of hoarse, and the most embarrassed, suddenly, that he's ever been in front of this person he's never, never been embarrassed in front of before.  "So don't say.  Not that, christ.  All right?"  
  
James squints at him, and Sirius looks away, pulling his hand off James's wrist - it will be easier to punch him in the face this way, he thinks, when he says something stupid or incriminating.  
  
"You don't - " says James, quietly, and then stops.  
  
"What."  
  
"Nothing."  
  
"You _do_ ," says Sirius.  "Need protecting.  I mean, for the love of – look at you."  
  
"Oh, shut it," sighs James, and unceremoniously pushes him into the thawing pond.  
  
   
\--  
  
  
He is still dripping when he stands at the door of No. 4 Underwood Road: the keys are never where he remembers they were last, and Remus got a nasty letter from the landlord the morning after Sirius said, _hold on, hold on ha ha ha ha fuck it_ , and jammed his wand in the lock (Remus had got them drunk enough to spend 15 minutes sitting on the stoop, stifling manic, idiotic laughter in each other’s necks, but Sirius knew that wasn’t what the letter was on about).  And he busies himself finding his wand in the plastered-down pocket of his jacket – the keys are now either in the bottom of the pond, or in the front pocket of his other jeans, which he remembers crumpled fondly on the top of Remus’s laundry bin.  
  
_Lauunndry_ , he’d sung, in the morning, when he’d pulled Remus’s oxford off over his head, and tossed it somewhere in the direction of the bin, and dabbed at the small scrapes on Remus’s neck that were causing all the fuss about washing up in the first place, what with the blood staining Remus’s collar and Sirius’s jeans, where he’d been liberally dripped on.  
  
That’s two moons worth right there, he’d said, and Remus had made a face like, _ouch_ , or maybe, _that is utterly disgusting and unacceptable how do I live in this pigsty I am supposed to be an adult._  
  
I’ll do it, Remus had said, and craned his neck a little, and Sirius had seen the shape of the cuts on his neck: shallow and pink, little vees like scraping claws or the tips of pointed teeth dragging in the air.  
  
Er, he’d said.  I think this was me, by the way, he’d said, and pressed a thumb against the tiny gouges.  
  
And Remus had made a funny sort of noise, as if he were terribly amused, but very, very tired, and he pressed a hand to Sirius’s shoulder, simply.  He’d said, Never mind.   Aren’t you meeting James?  
  
And now, he shakes himself off in the doorway, with his hair plastered to his temples and his cheeks, and his trousers making puddles underneath his feet.  He refuses to give James the pleasure of any sort of drying charm.  If he’s going to be accused of being, he thinks, of being generally miserable, he’s not going to make the guilt go away very easily, he’s decided.  I’m going to play the fucking part, he thinks, HULLO WORLD I AM GENERALLY SOPPING WET AND GENERALLY MISERABLE AND HA HA HA YOU THINK YOU’VE GOT THE BEST OF ME HAVE YOU OH HO OH HO.  
  
Generally miserable, he thinks, and snorts, what fucking rot.  I have reason enough, if I wanted, he thinks, I could be generally _logically_ miserable, I could be a basket case.  He shakes a bit of water from his sleeve, and thinks, if it were like _that_ , he thinks, I could be an absolute nutter by now.  And it’d be nothing more than expected.  
  
He is taking great pains to slosh as loudly as possible up the stairs, when he almost runs headlong into Remus, who is only eight hours or so off a full moon, who is one step off the first floor landing, and who is in his coat and scarf, and looking suddenly, vaguely surprised and put-off at the timing of this particular encounter.  
  
"What the hell," says Sirius, arms stretched to block his way.  "Where are you going, you have a fever."  
  
"Er," says Remus.  "Why are you wet?"  
  
"I'm going to kill James," says Sirius.  "Where are you _going_."  
  
Remus raises an eyebrow (there is a scrape on the underside of his jaw which is still bleeding).  "Were you swimming? On purpose?  Why were you – it's the middle of March."  
  
"You are _bleeding_ on the _stairs,_ " Sirius hisses, and takes a step forward.  
  
Remus raises his palms, but doesn't budge.  "I'm fine," he says, finally.  "I have to - "  
  
“I’m going to kill James,” says Sirius.  “And then finish what the fucking werewolf started.”  And he takes three more steps, and Remus blinks at him, not quite innocently and almost bored.  
  
“Horrible sort of threat,” murmurs Remus, hands falling to the banister and the wall, again.   “And not at all very funny.”  (Although the edges of his mouth are tipped upwards, maybe.)  
  
“Wasn’t meant to be,” Sirius glares.  “It’s like can feel you dying of cholera from here, you dumb shite.”  
  
“Not _quite_ the appropriate analogy, thank you,” Remus says, politely, brightly.  “What did you do for James to try and drown you, exactly.”  
  
“I don’t care,” says Sirius, harshly, because it didn’t do a thing and now all he wants more than ever, _ever_ , is to have fixed this all years ago, before he could ever imagine a time when James would turn to him and say _We can’t do this, mate_.  “Babies, maybe.”  
  
“What?” Remus blinks. “I don’t think that’s – ”  
  
“Not _him_ ,” says Sirius, and he has two of his fingers tucked up against the hem of Remus’s jumper, and he is feeling quite glassy-eyed and scattered-wide, at the moment, and he thinks perhaps the hypothermia has caught up with him.  “In general. General sprogs.  Fuck, I don’t know.”  
  
“Er,” says Remus, and makes a half-completed gesture with one hand, as if he thinks it might be a good idea to check Sirius’s temperature, or perhaps to stop him leaking all over the stairwell.  “Clearly.”  
  
“He,” says Sirius, fingers curling into another cable of Remus’s jumper, because he is entirely uninterested, suddenly, in anything except wool and warm skin and damp cheeks, and not having to stand on his own feet, for a while.  “Thinks I am a _problem_.”  
  
“You’ve always been a problem,” says Remus, his hand still hovering somewhere near Sirius’s shoulder, and their faces are very close, now.  “You are what they refer to as a ‘Problem Child’.”  
  
“It’s a very kind way of putting it,” he says, against Remus’s mouth.  
  
“How would you say it?” murmurs Remus.  
  
He kisses Remus, there on the stairs.  Remus is taller than him, like this, and he has to lean up, and the tips of his knuckles on his fisted hand graze the front of Remus’s chest, so he can feel the moment when Remus inhales, slowly, and he likes it.  
  
“Maybe,” he says, against Remus’s mouth, which is dry and still quite pale.  “I don’t know, like that.”  
  
“That didn’t say anything of the sort,” smiles Remus.  
  
“Didn’t,” he mutters.  “Didn’t _say_.  Christ.  Christ, you piss me off, Lupin.”  
  
“I know,” says Remus, and smiles like he does when he is hiding something: a secret, a shame, a headache, the last piece of baklava.  
  
“Don’t make that face at me,” he says, and touches his knuckles to Remus’s chest, again.  
  
“Don’t treat me like a child,” grins Remus, teeth bared, body swayed backwards, slightly.  “And I swear to god, if you keep dripping on me, I’ll _evict_ you.”  
  
“Filthy talk,” Sirius growls, and fumbles with the doorknob to the flat, even though he’s perfectly happy to pin Remus up against the wood of the door, like this.  “Just keep it up, creature of the night.”  
  
“Those – ah – those jokes are only funny when I don’t still feel like raw meat,” Remus murmurs, fingers over Sirius’s damp ones, on the doorknob; his voice hitches when the door swings open, and Sirius’s ankles bump against his, when they stumble inside.  
  
“I’ll show you _raw meat_ ,” Sirius hisses, half-laughing, half on the verge of something else entirely which makes him feel as though he is teetering violently between sunlight and some dark, damp and dusty cell, where the walls close in with every breath.  
  
Remus laughs, and he has both hands against Sirius’s face, and he _kisses_ him, when he says, “That doesn’t, that doesn’t make any sense,” and Sirius keeps pushing, because it’s so rare and wonderful he thinks maybe if he doesn’t keep forcing time to move on, the moment will freeze before he can kiss Remus back, or open up his shirt, or bury his face in the damp hair at his nape, or anything of the sort, and he doesn’t want that (he doesn’t know which way, he thinks, that the teetering will go).  
  
“God,” mumbles Remus, around his mouth, at the threshold to his bedroom (which is the only fucking proper bed in the flat, thinks Sirius, in my _life_ , fuck it).   “I can’t believe it – you’re as good as going to tie me down, aren’t you.   T’keep me here.”  
  
Sirius makes an affected, interested noise (his tongue is occupied), and Remus boxes his ears with a loose fist, and once of them ends up with a jumper-sleeve half-off and Sirius gets his feet tangled in the haphazard laundry basket, and reaches out behind himself to keep from toppling backwards.  
  
Remus grins, holding onto the front of Sirius’s shirt with curled fingers.  “You’re - ”  
  
_In a mood?_ He thinks.  _About close to imploding if I don’t get to peel those stupid clothes off you?_ He thinks _.  Absolutely,_ he thinks _, Absolutely, completely, entirely, wholly in -_  
  
“Don’t _say_ it,” he hisses, and Remus pushes him back against the mattress, with a fist to his sternum, fingers tangling with the buttonholes, and his teeth closed on Sirius's bottom lip.  He makes a rough sort of noise in his throat when his knee slips and his elbow presses into Sirius's shoulder, and Sirius catches at his thigh to keep them from toppling.  
  
Remus pauses to draw back, eyelids heavy, fingers moving slowly over the exposed part of Sirius’s skin, where the collarbone meets the collar-of-his-shirt, where it is cool and tingling.  
  
"Did you want - " Sirius manages, because his breathing has managed to get sort of tangled up and shallow.  
  
"No - I," Remus mumbles, wetting his lips.  
  
Sirius bends a leg, sliding his thigh against Remus's ribs; his hips tilt, and Remus's spine curves, a little, in answer. "If you did," he says.  "We could if you - "  
  
"Shut up," whispers Remus, head bowed, cheek tucked just under Sirius’s jaw.  “Just – “  
  
Sirius raises a hand, smoothes his palm over the scruffy hairs at Remus's nape, weaves his fingers into it so he can tilt Remus's head, so he can nip his teeth at the skin there, just behind his ear.  
  
Remus's laugh huffs against his neck, his cheek; and Sirius wants to tear away every last layer of that lingering resistance, these odd moments where Remus still pretends to be _surprised_ , of all the stupid, bloody things to be.  
  
“C’mere,” he mumbles, and leans back, weight onto one elbow, his spine pressing to the sheets, his other hand tugging at the front of Remus’s trousers.  “An’ get these open.”  
  
Remus teeters on his knees; his breathless grin fades when Sirius lies back, fingers hooking into the flies of his trousers, pulling them open as he pulls Remus forward with it, and Remus makes a rough, questing sound.  
  
“C’mere, I said,” he whispers, mostly to himself, because when he glances up through his hair he sees Remus is watching him with incredulity, and even better, with _anticipation_.  And maybe it makes him a little braver, he thinks, maybe this will be good, he thinks, when he presses one firm palm to the back of Remus’s thigh and tugs him in closer still, with Remus’s knees wedged up against his underarms, and his other hand shoving at the opening of Remus's pants.  
  
Remus is so barely shaking he is almost still, with his hands caught where they first tried to catch his weight, one on Sirius’s shoulder, the other pressed against the wall, above Sirius’s head, and he is almost, _almost_ , not breathing, except that it is the only sound he is making.  When Sirius presses one palm flat to the small of Remus’s back, just under his waistband, and his tongue rasps up the underside of Remus’s cock, throat aching and his mouth too wet, lips too stretched, Remus _exhales_ , and Sirius can only imagine that he is just this side of trying to chew off his own tongue.  
  
He cranes his neck, and presses firmly with the hand that is resting on the damp skin of Remus’s back.  He closes his eyes when he sucks in his cheeks, long, slow movements, and a slight and playful curl of tongue.  (He feels the pulses, the hardening, and it makes him _giddy_.)  
  
“ _Oh, fuck_ ,” whispers Remus, suddenly, politely, into the air above the damp mess of Sirius’s hair, and there is a tightening of his thighs, and his knees slip by Sirius’s ribs.  “ _Fuck_.”  
  
He grips tighter, thumb dragging along the damp skin of Remus’s hip, his inner thigh, and behind his balls and Remus makes a sound like the summer, cotton sun: soft, warm, muffled behind the thick air, like -- _nnh_.  His skin is _lit_ , now, thinks Sirius; when he moves his head to mouth at the thin, silver-tissue scars on Remus’s inner thigh, Remus’s breathing sounds like the crackle-hiss of a match, scared of itself, that first hesitation before the flare.  He presses his thumb back, farther, and Remus _thrusts_ , and he grins when Remus’s cock slides against his cheek, the corner of his mouth, slippery and shameless.  
  
“Want this?” he mumbles, tongue dragging along the tip of Remus’s erection, again, fingers circling the base, other hand holding him splayed and shaking, _just_ this side of pressing _in_ , and I know, he thinks, I know I know I know, I’m a horrific tease, I just want to _hear it_.  
  
But Remus makes an eager, incoherent sound, and there is a thud of bone against wood when Remus’s arm slips from the headboard and tries to tangle in Sirius’s hair.  His fingers catch against Sirius’s jaw, instead, around the hot, damp curve of his neck, and Remus tugs, once, upwards.  
  
He lets go of Remus’s cock, reluctantly, letting his mouth slide against the bones of Remus’s shoulder as he struggles to sitting, Remus’s thighs still tight and hot around his hips.  He lets his fingers slip up into the damp curls by Remus’s nape, spreading them there letting them rest heavily, feeling the weight, as he tips Remus’s head to the side, mouth against his neck.  
  
“Gonna fuck you,” he hisses, in Remus’s ear, and Remus’s fingers twitch against his hip.  
  
“ _Mm_ h – about time, too,” Remus mumbles, the damp slide of a shaking smile against his jawline, and that rare, surprised sort of shudder, when he reaches down, fingers grazing the crease of Remus’s arse, nails pressed to the skin.  
  
Remus shifts like a staccato, like his uneven breath is in every inch of his skin and bone and flushing nerves.  His shoulders are high, sharp shadows in the light, his elbow scrapes Sirius’s ribs like the rip of a matchlight, when he raises himself off Sirius’s thighs, pushing his trousers and pants down to his knees, making to turn.  
  
“No,” Sirius manages, fingers closing damp and tight on Remus’s wrist, holding Remus where he is as he leans back, hips arching under Remus’s weight.  
  
“Like,” he mumbles, wetting his lips, tongue gone dry.  “Maybe, like this.”  
  
It’s not usually like this; usually Sirius likes to have his elbows locked, his head made heavy and weak from excitement, with his body slick and heavy over Remus’s, with all of Remus’s body pressing back up against his; he likes to bury things into the dark place behind Remus’s ear.  He likes to press _down_ , usually (and Remus, he thinks, if given the chance to pause, Remus might just starting _thinking_ about orgasms, and then they’d _never_ accomplish fucking anything).  
  
“Like this?” murmurs Remus, a legitimate question; he is still caught in the shifting (ready to turn to the sheets, and Sirius swallows heavily, throat thick with the thought of the length of Remus’s bare, rough back, and his thighs spread and gathered up under his hips and _oh, oh yeah, that – that might be nice too_ ).  
  
“Yeah,” Sirius grins, bares his teeth, feels the air hit the inside of his mouth, his tongue, like a hissing chill, there is almost a _crackle_ in the air when he exhales.  
  
And Remus leans over him, sliding up over Sirius’s thighs, straddling his hips; his skin feels damp, and hot, and tissue-thin – there is the tight shift of bone under it all, under his thumbs (which are on Remus’s hips), there is the terrifyingly bright and familiar burgeoning push of blood through veins, under his lips and tongue and teeth (which are scraping along Remus’s throat).  
  
“Don’t suppose,” pants Remus, dry fingers encircling Sirius’s wrist, lifting his hand.  “You’ve got anything to make it easier on me.”  
  
“Later,” he mumbles, and lets Remus slide a finger of his captive hand between Remus’s parted lips, warmwet roughness of Remus’s tongue curling over his fingerprints, his knuckles; he rubs his thumb in the small dint of Remus’s chin.  
  
Remus shifts, he lets his hand fall from Sirius’s wrist to Sirius’s chest, palm hot and dry over the place where Sirius feels that his lungs, tight and rib-wrenched, are struggling to get enough air.  Remus lifts his body, his knees tighten around Sirius’s hips; Sirius lets his finger slip from Remus’s mouth, and paints a slow, wet circle over the back of Remus’s thigh.  He slides his finger up and _in_ , and Remus makes a light, uneven noise, hand curling over Sirius’s collarbone.  
  
He likes this part, the shuddering points of this act where he can exert this kind of heedless power, and _watch_ , narrow-eyed and excited, watch the way Remus’s face flickers with arousal, how tight his breathing gets, how his shoulders winch and release, spine arcing, the small pressings and pushings of Remus’s hips.  He likes the way he can feel Remus’s body tighten, the scrabble of his fingers, the _wshht_ of breath against his jaw, his ear, his throat, the heavy, hot, involuntary twitch of Remus’s cock through his thin t-shirt, against his belly.  
  
He shoves at Remus’s trousers with his other hand, growling against Remus’s jaw when they snag, when they won’t just _come off_ , and Remus groans, shakily, shifting awkward and disarming in how unpracticed it looks, when he fumbles to pull one leg out, and then the other.  He leaves them crumpled underneath Sirius’s thighs, and bare to the waist, in only his socks, face pink and mouth parted, he settles over Sirius’s hips again, and _oh_ , thinks Sirius _, this is just lovely_ , with the way they fit together now, with Remus’s legs spread wide over his lap, the hot line of his cock trapped against Sirius’s stomach, the way Sirius can grip at his arse with one hand, pulling him open, pulling him close, when he thrusts, twists, a finger up inside him again.   And Remus kisses him, both palms cupping his jaw, fingers framing the flush and the heat in his face.  It has _force_ , in it, panting and claustrophobic and _almost_ desperate, _almost_ euphoric.  
  
You’ve got me, he thinks, he wants to say, it’s all right _, it’s all right mate, you’re fine, you’ve had me for a long time yet._  
  
But he presses closer with his hips, instead, squeezing Remus’s thigh with one hand, and twisting two fingers now, deeper inside Remus, with the other.  Remus’s body is tight, abrasive, it always has an edge of resistance, a safeguard in his awkward jointedness, which is so often so unpliable, worn and wobbly edges of a puzzle-piece, a hot coil of danger in the way his teeth go immediately for Sirius’s bottom lip, when he exhales.  But it doesn’t matter, Sirius thinks, and snaps at the hot air between their mouths, grinning.  
  
It doesn’t matter, he thinks, because I know all your secrets.  I know all your secrets and I know, I know I know I know, I know that means you can’t be scared of me, anymore.  
  
He flicks with his thumb at the sensitive, dark-patched skin just behind his twisting, thrusting fingers, and Remus’s spine arcs, bows, sharply, a hiss-lit exhale – _fuck, fuck, ah - Sirius -_ against the corner of his mouth.  
  
“Christ,” he manages, wet and shaking into Remus’s mouth.   “Christ – you feel _so_ – ”  
  
Remus kisses him again, into shaking, excited silence, and he can feel Remus wedge a hand between them, between their bellies, gripping at his own cock, stroking it so his knuckles press against Sirius’s body, rucking up his shirt, and he hisses, teeth closing on Remus’s bottom lip, when he feels the damp head of it sliding against his bared skin.  
  
“Like that?” he manages; his voice doesn’t sound like his own, it rattles in his skull, fires down into his joints, he feels Remus’s fingers stutter in their stroking, the clench of his body when he shifts, makes a sound like _nhh_.  
  
“Wait, _fuck_ \- ” Remus hisses, when Sirius slides his fingers out from Remus’s body, gripping him with both hands now, over the curve of his arse, and Remus’s hips pull back into his palms, fingers fumbling between them at the flies of Sirius’s jeans.  There is the clink of his belt, the thick, slithering sound of leather, the _click-click-click-click_ of the zipper, Remus’s now-slick fingers pushing at the thin fabric; he pushes up into the touch, and _oh_ , he thinks _, oh god oh god this is so good._   He kisses Remus, hard, and the heavy, slow, awkward touch of Remus’s fingers on his cock falters, shifts, Remus is gripping hard at the back of his neck with his other hand: five points of heat against his spine.  
  
“C’mon,” he manages, thick and humid in the tight air between their mouths, licking the promise onto Remus’s tongue.  “C’mon – let me - ”  
  
“W-wait,” Remus arches, pushing his hips back, up, hands sliding roughly to Sirius’s hips, shoving at his jeans, and Sirius grins, feels it stretching – lewd and tight – over his face.  “You have to – ”  
  
“Budge up,” he whispers, nudging at Remus’s thigh.  Remus lifts himself up onto his knees, and now it is suddenly slower, languid and careful.  He thinks, he could take his time here.  He slides his tongue over the inside of his teeth and he thinks he could go slower.  He could push Remus down to the sheets and mouth up the inside of his bared thighs, could hook Remus’s knee over his shoulder when he tongues at the dark, comforting divots of his body, could make him _shake_ with the want to come, could make Remus tug and twist at his hair with scrabbling, desperate fingers.  He could take his time, and taste all of him, he thinks.  He could fuck him like this first, he thinks, Remus could ride him, and then he could turn him to the mattress, curl up behind him, hold him open and fuck up into him with his arms wrapped all the way around his body like a shaking vine, like a coil of bandages, stroke his cock and crane his head to kiss him, to mouth at the damp ridges of Remus’s spine, and ah, oh – _fuck –_ he thinks, desperately, I can’t –  
  
But Remus is panting, hot and damp and shaking against his temple, his hands gripping, pushing down on Sirius’s shoulders. He shifts his own hips, lying back enough to shuck his jeans and briefs, letting them stay rucked down and tangled on his ankles, and he grips the base of his own cock.  His vision narrows when he strokes it, slow, watching the smears of dampness over the creases of skin, between his fingers; he presses the head of it up against the skin behind Remus’s balls, holding him open with the ‘l’ of a thumb and finger, rubbing it there against his entrance, teasing, and Remus swears at him, softly, incoherent, a scrape of nails over his shoulders.  He holds himself there, careful not to disturb this tenuous, _aching,_ wonderfully filthy sort of moment, when he stretches an arm, fumbling between the mattress and the springs for the small, sticky jar.  
  
“If -- you’re going to,” Remus whispers, voice teetering on the damp and shaking skin of Sirius’s temple.   “Come _on_.”  
  
He grins, nipping at the skin against his mouth, a tendon of Remus’s throat.  He slicks himself, fingers cold and wet and _just_ this side of uncontrollably shaking.  “ _You_ do it, then, if you’re so - ” he hisses.  Remus is shifting, spreading his thighs, gripping Sirius’s cock with his own fingers, _directing_ it as he lowers his hips.  “ _Fuck –_ eager.”  
  
Their thighs are wet, the press of heat is _obscene_ , he thinks, and he's _not_ in control, he thinks, he doesn't _want_ to be, he wants to give it up, out – he shoves his hips up, his cock deeper, _oh_ – let me see, he thinks, let me see this moment mould itself into desperation, _to wring the words from your mouth_.  It doesn't matter, he hisses, what I say – you'll say no, you'll say no. He knows.  
  
“Come _on_ ,” he groans.  “Oh, oh, fuck.” He has to shut his eyes; Remus has tipped his head to the side, lolling, the curve of his throat, the slope of his neck pale and bared.  
  
“Why the hell - " he hisses, panting because he cannot quite laugh.  " - should I keep giving you. You all these _chances_."  
  
Remus fists a handful of his hair, and it stings when his body bucks, and he leans forward to brace himself.  "A-ah -- _me_?" he whispers, face red and eyebrows drawn.  
  
Sirius narrows his eyes, mouth skimming the damp skin of Remus's throat, thumbs tightening on the front of his hips, pulling him down, in, and Remus swears sharply, against his ear.  
  
"You know," he whispers, craning his neck so his mouth catches on the bunched nerves of Remus's jaw; he plants one foot on the cushions to press his hips _up,_ jeans catching at his damp skin.  "You know I'm not patient."  
  
 "Ah - _fuck_ \- " Remus jerks, against Sirius's hands, slumping to one elbow by Sirius's head, and when Sirius looks up at him in this scrabbling, claustrophobic space, he sees that Remus has his eyes squeezed shut, and the scars on his nose stand out from the flush in his face.  
  
"No - " hisses Remus, and grips at the back of Sirius's neck.  "Don't say - "  
  
Sirius feels the growl in the back of his throat like a hot, boiling mass: he forces it into Remus's mouth, bites it out against Remus's lower lip; Remus wraps both hands against the back of Sirius's neck and hauls him up to sitting, with both his thighs tight around Sirius's waist.  He feels the high, tight shudder that grips at Remus’s spine, he feels the absolutely stifling, dizzying surge of his own hips up into Remus’s body (he digs his heels into the mattress and has to brace himself back on one hand; he’s never been this _deep_ , shoving up _hard_ into Remus when he’s already been worked open enough to be fucked to the hilt, when Remus is already panting high in the back of his throat, as though he can’t breathe, when Remus is gripping his neck and shoulders, and pushing _down)_.  
  
“Oh – f- _fuck_ ,” he stutters, because he is suddenly on the verge of being ruthless, and this is suddenly-almost violent, and it is being dragged out of him because Remus - with his back bowed, and his wet thighs, and his tongue catching between his teeth when he inhales – looks as if he’s still _almost, a – ah – fuck, Sirius, almost_ not deep enough.  
  
“Shit - ” he chokes on his own whisper. “Shit – look, look at you.”  
  
Remus flushes, sharply, and pulls Sirius’s face up to his with his fingers digging into Sirius’s jaw and his teeth scraping Sirius’s tongue when he kisses him.  Sirius grunts, and digs his heels into the mattress again, hips pistoning up, Remus gripping at his hair and the headboard for any kind of – but, oh, god, it hits him, he’s _fucking_ him, god, yes, he can’t tell if he’s speaking, if he’s groaning, if he’s even in his own body, anymore, but _god_ –  
  
Remus comes with his face buried in Sirius’s neck, teeth white-hot points against his throat, and a hot spread of wetness suddenly smeared between them, and the tightness of his body, every space where his skin is pressed against Remus’s body, the heat bleeds into his skin, and just makes him want to swallow it up, devour it, lick it teethe it down into his belly taste it on his tongue and his teeth let it fill him up from the inside out every part of him better than anything than everything and his oh _fuck,_ he thinks _, I love this I love this Remus_ this is this is I – _oh._  
  
The fade out is slow, and still so hot, and the position is achingly, tryingly familiar, with Remus’s thighs wedged in tight around his waist, and naked, sweaty limbs all jangled together, feeling reformed, feeling renewed and old and drawn to a trembling, happy blank, all at once.  He slides his palms, numb and weighted, up Remus’s slumped spine, sliding his fingers up into Remus’s damp hair, and Remus exhales, ragged, as if he’s had the wind knocked from him.  
  
“Mgfh,” says Remus, into Sirius’s neck, a soft groan whistling against the cooling sweat on his skin.  He feels like laughing, like burying the warmth bubbling in his chest and squeezing his ribs into Remus’s skin, of kissing him and feeling it in both their throats.  He shifts, turns his head, tips Remus’s chin up with his thumb and rubs his mouth over Remus’s, slow and lazy.  
  
“Good?” he mumbles.  
  
Remus snorts, softly, shifting his heavy weight from Sirius’s lap.  Sirius sighs, closes his eyes, and feels it: a soft wince, as Sirius slips out, and the sound of rustling, rasping sheets, the dip of the mattress beside him.  
  
“Ow,” says Remus, muffled.  
  
“Sorry,” rasps Sirius, and it doesn’t know what it’s for, except that somewhere along the way, he was probably responsible for _something_.  
  
“Don’t,” says Remus, turns his cheek to the pillow; Sirius glances over – heavily, sleepily – sees one bleary-bright eye, and the sharp glint of an eyetooth.  “Do just be pleased with yourself, and we can all move on.”  
  
“Christ,” says Sirius, and smoothes a happy, uninhibited palm down Remus’s spine.  “Has nobody ever fucking taught you how to _bask_?”  
  
“ _Ahm amf maffkinh_ ,” says Remus, into the pillows.  
  
Sirius laughs, he can’t _help_ it, it’s so ridiculous.  
  
“I am basking,” repeats Remus, his head slightly raised this time.  “You’re ruining it.”  
  
“I’m the _cause_ of it,” Sirius corrects, grinning at the ceiling, tucking an arm behind his head.  
  
“Egoist,” mutters Remus, and glances at the sweaty, damp mess that is Sirius’s shirt, plastered and drying to his skin.  “Er, sorry.”  
  
“I don’t _mind_ ,” Sirius laughs, again – he can’t stop it, being so _happy_ , why can’t it be like this, he thinks, all the time, would that just ruin the whole thing?  “I don’t mind. Christ.”  
  
“Still,” Remus mumbles, tucking his chin into his folded arms, watching Sirius with heavy-lidded eyes.  “Could have been a bit more organized about the whole thing.”  
  
“Fuck that,” he laughs.  He resists the urge to glance down at his wrinkled jeans, still tangled-caught around his ankles, at his smeared stomach and his flushed skin.  He thinks, maybe, he’d rather look at Remus, anyway: over his skin and scars and tiny, fresh scrapes, turned pink and orange-flesh in the late-day light, at his closed eyes and his finally, _finally,_ maybe-easy breathing.  I’d rather be here, he thinks, forever, maybe, even though that sounds, that sounds so _stupid_.  But I would, he thinks.  And Remus is asleep, he thinks, or dozing unconcerned, shaken out and put back together, just like him, so he can’t think to ask, can’t think to slide a hand up into his hair and press his mouth to the shell of Remus’s ear.  He can’t think to ask, _but would you_?  
  
  
\--  
  
  
At the end of April, Remus stands in the kitchen by the pot of bubbling pasta, watching Sirius hack at a bowl of tomatoes (meant for the sauce, for supper), and he says _My Da's sick._  
  
Sirius curses at a spurt of slimy, malicious tomato-seeds on his shirtsleeve.  "What," he says.  "Sorry, what?"  
  
"My Da's sick," says Remus, again.  "I'm going to go.  See him."  
  
Sirius frowns, and jabs at the pile, again.  "Shit, mate," he says.  
  
"There's a train tomorrow morning," says Remus.  When Sirius glances over at him, he has one arm crossed, the other arm propped against it, and the knuckle of his thumb against his teeth, which means he has practiced this stupid fucking conversation inside his head at _least_ 5 times, thinks Sirius, and tried to imagine all the ways that I'll fuck it up for him, or he'll fuck it up for me.  
  
"You need a lift?" he asks, which means the motorbike, newly beaten into relative submission.  
  
"No," says Remus. "Sorry, I - "  
  
He pauses, and Sirius glances at him again, and Remus gives him a funny, distracted sort of grin from behind his fingers.  
  
"I’ll come with," says Sirius, even though he knows.  
  
"Sorry," says Remus, again.  "I've no idea for how long..."  
  
"So you'll write," says Sirius, and shrugs, and he suddenly hates _everything_.  "So, it's fine."  
  
"I think it's done," says Remus, and Sirius stares at him for five, endless, sun-stopping seconds, with his ribs slowly sinking and wobbling in his chest, with his spine _just_ this side of failing to hold his body straight, before he realizes that Remus is taking the boiling pot off the stove, that Remus is sidestepping around him to the sink, that Remus meant the pasta.  
  
_Fuck_ , he thinks, and viciously mangles the last whole tomato.  _Oh my god._  
  
"You know, when you cut off your finger," says Remus, draining the water so that the steam rises up and bounces off the basin and the walls and their skin, dissolving.  "I'm not going to do a bloody thing to sew it back on for you, I’ve warned you."  
  
"Blah-blah-blah," grins Sirius, flicking a bit of tomato skin at him.  "You say that _now_ , but you'd be _pained_ when you're old and crippled and alone and require my culinary _expertise_."  
  
He is standing very close, Sirius realizes.  Closer than he ever does without someone stepping in first, to eat up all the edgy space around him, so that he thinks, someone, he has a sudden, clear path where there wasn't one before.  He is standing with his hip and his side and his arm pressed against Sirius's hip and side and arm, so that they are standing at the counter, both of them facing out toward the window, and they are looking at tomato pulp and steaming noodles, rather than at each other.  
  
"You should stay," says Remus.  "Here, I mean."  
  
"Well," Sirius mutters.  " _Yeah_."  
  
"I'll still go half-rent, I meant," says Remus.  
  
"Your da," says Sirius.  "He'll be fine."  Which means, _the hell you will_.  
  
Remus is silent, and out of the corner of his eye, Sirius can just see the tightening of the jaw; he can feel the tension in the shoulder pressed against his arm, which is _I am going to move away now_ , which is, _how the hell do you know that._  
  
So he hooks his arm around Remus's shoulders, around his neck, so his loose fist rests just under Remus's chin, so he can hold him there and wait for Remus to fucking _cry_ , already, he's only been waiting for that since he met him, and he hasn't ever, not once, and it's absolutely infuriating, he thinks, considering how many times _he_ has (whether anybody was there to notice, or not).  
  
But Remus doesn't.  So he says, _Because he's a good bloke.  Because I like him, all right, he'll be fine,_ and Remus laughs, a little, instead.  
 

\--   
  
  
Regulus presses four fingers to the wood of the door.  Fear is like a trickle of ice in his throat, like a melting, shaking coil of gelatinous snakes in his belly.  His palm slips on the knob; his wand is searing where it presses to his chest inside his pocket.  The door opens gently, silently, and just he feels the crackle of the ward crumble like dust at his whisper, at the strange and dark protection at his back, over his face, around his neck and in his wand, time seems to grow into one, fluid, strange and immortal space.  It is like, he thinks, he moves through it, and leaves four whole seconds behind him at the threshold.  
  
The man is standing in his tiny kitchen with his wand drawn halfway up his torso, _just_ turned, _just_ in that instant.  There is a shattered cup on the linoleum floor.  There is an amber puddle pooling slowly under the porcelain.  There is a kettle steaming softly on the gas stovetop.  
  
Regulus has it, like that cold-water spike up into his backbone, up into his throat and his tongue and his voice, and the odd thing is, he thinks, is that it sounds exactly like he has always sounded, except that he is, for the first time, ahead of it all.  The man, for the first time, Regulus imagines, is too late.  He crumples, a little, and goes shocked and soft in the eyes, before his legs lock and his ankles tip and he falls to the ground.  And the puddle of tea seeps a dark pool in the left leg of his ripped denim jeans.  
  
Regulus takes care to keep his feet straight and his steps careful as he crosses the floor.  The kitchen, except for the dripping tea, looks as if it has been cleaned recently, and it smells of sweet herbs.  The walls are soft egg-cream coloured, and there is a newspaper spread tidily on the wood table, and the icebox is green like the flesh of an olive and it is all sort of awkward and wonderful.  The teakettle is the colour of a poppy.  He thinks that he likes it, quite a bit.  He thinks, pausing, that if he had a kitchen, if he had a flat, if he was just coming home to fix a cup of tea, he would want this one, he would want to do that sort of thing right here.  
  
The man is staring at the ceiling, and Regulus knows that he would probably like to close his eyes at this point, but it’s a risk.  It takes time, and he is losing a lot of things, very rapidly.  He steps over the man, one foot on either side of his ribs.  
  
“For the unjust murder of Opaline Travers,” he says, a buzzing in the back of his skull where his mask is drawn tight and tied. He crouches, and his robes pool in the broken ceramic and cooling tea.  “For daring to stand against our Lord.”  
  
"I am supposed to – " he says, knees against the man's hips, wand pressed to the place where the man's collarbones dip to meet.  
  
The man has eyes like a doe, soft and brown and sleepy with _Stupefy_ , with the oncoming.  His lips are half-open in the space of a word. With a wand pressed to his heart, you can imagine the sound behind the breathing.  _Please.  Don't.  Do.  Please._   or even _Ah._  
  
"Ah – " Regulus whispers, and finds enough hatred in himself to taste bile on his tongue.  "Ah - _Avada Kedavra_."  
  
He wipes his wand on his trousers. I wish someone would be proud, he thinks, that they'll never, ever find this body.  
  
\--

Remus's da dies at the end of the month, and Sirius gets two owls on a Sunday morning, when he is making his second cup of tea with Remus's insolent kettle and eating bacon with his fingers straight from the pan, because no one is there to smack his wrist for doing so, and there is no one there that he can drag into the loo by the ties of his housecoat and fuck roughly under the shower-spray, in retaliation.   
  
The first letter says I'll be back in London at the end of the week, I suppose, I just have to settle things with the farm, you know, after the funeral, and then I'll be back in London. So, the end of the week. And Remus has fucking signed it, and fucking dated it, and written Sirius's name at the top, with a happy little comma and a smart little paragraph break, and it makes him furious because it is an awful way to write a letter.   
  
The second letter says DEARBORN’S REALLY MISSING MATE QUITE DODGY DOESN’T LOOK TOO GOOD NOW Because they had been worried, they had been suspecting, for a while now, that they really had, and - well, Sirius thinks, and goes to find a quill.   
  
He replies to James, first, and writes: On it, which means that he sees James first today, and Dumbledore after.  
  
He replies to Remus second, and writes: I'll pick you up. He writes, Just wait there, I'll come get you when you're ready.  
  
And it is not until that evening that Remus's old and oddly-furry owl finds him in the sitting room of James and Lily's house, with a cup of cold tea by his feet, and James and Lily arguing in the kitchen.   
  
No, thank you, the letter says. I've some things to do. I’ve some things to do, first, says Remus handwriting, with proper periods and spaces, and a neatly folded piece of parchment, all-in-all-in-all. I'll just go home.  
  
When he does, it is Saturday afternoon, and he walks in the front door of the flat with his coat buttoned up to his chin and his one, small suitcase under his arm, and Sirius is still so furious with him, he cannot speak at first.   
  
"Oh," says Remus, when he looks up, and sees him. "You're here."  
  
And Sirius makes a quicksilver sort of choice between punching him, or trying to get all those ridiculous, stupid, unnecessary coat-buttons open so he can fuck Remus on the couch. And in the end, he even opts to give up on the buttons halfway, so that when he tries to push it over Remus's head, it gets tangled in their arms and hands, and all Sirius can do is lean down and kiss Remus as hard as he can (until Remus finally pushes a knee against Sirius's belly, so he can wrench his own arms free, at least, even if they do end up bracing themselves on the back of the couch, and in a tangle of Sirius's hair).  
  
You said 'go', says Sirius, afterwards. Why the hell would you say that.  
  
Remus pushes a pillow in his face and says Mmgh shut up I don't know what you mean, and so Sirius watches him fall asleep on his front, with his face still half-squashed against the armrest, and the red edges of a bite-mark on his shoulder blade, and his hand loosely curled in the pillow (Sirius shifts it off his face enough so he can see and breathe, because this way, it looks like Remus is still reaching for him, after all).   
  
  


\--  


  
  
He wakes in the middle of the night with a crick in his neck, and one foot jammed in between the cushions at the far end of the couch, and his right arm gone numb and heavy where it is tucked under his own cheek. And his shirt is still rucked up, slightly, and his mouth tastes vaguely furry, and full of ash. But his trousers have been buttoned again, and Remus’s coat is spread out over his back and hips. And when he rubs the heel of one hand against his eyes to clear the muss of sleep away, he hears the faint hsssht soundwhirl of water running in the sink; he sees the door of the loo cracked open, the thin and tinny light scuttling out across the carpet.   
  
He is still half-asleep: his body is loose and warm and wobbling when he stands, and he knocks his shin against a pile of books, and stubs his toe against the foot of the armchair, and he hisses ah – fuck against the inside of a bitten lip, and the sound of the water stops when he pushes the door open.   
  
Remus looks up at the mirror (Remus looks up at him through the mirror), face and fringe still damp, and his hands stilled in a towel, and the nape of his neck still vaguely flushed.   
  
“All right?” says Remus, to the shadow-place over the reflection of his right shoulder, where Sirius knows he is standing, just inside the dark.   
  
And Sirius finds he cannot answer: there are heavy and cloying things coating his teeth and tongue, sticking in the back of his throat, starting all the way down in his chest, where recently his ribs feel as if they have been jostled about and put-together sort of wrongly, all on top of all the usual scooping out (it was when he wasn’t paying much attention, to that sort of thing).   
  
He finds himself thinking about things like You are the most infuriating person I’ve ever known worse than that ponce what writes the books, you know and I keep thinking I’m fucking this up and Sometimes you look at me like that like I’m exactly what you’re frightened of and I missed youand I miss you and I missed you, of course I missed you, you stupid, stupid fuck.   
  
“Yeah,” he says, and rubs his eyes again. “All right, you?”   
  
“Mm,” says Remus. “All right.”   
  
I had a fight with James, he thinks. That night I came back wet-through, I had a fight with James about who was worth dying for.   
  
“Bit of a rough time, eh,” he says, stretched into a yawn.   
  
“No worse than life,” says Remus, and he grins, and the single light-bulb overhead seems to take a flickering offense to that.   
  
“Augh,” Sirius mutters, and reaches out with one hand; he curls a bit of the back of Remus’s jumper-hem into his fist. “That’s awful.”   
  
Remus stills; Sirius can see he has one hand braced firmly on the porcelain edge of the sink, knuckles tight and tense.   
  
Oh, come on, Sirius thinks, and tightens his fist. Honestly.   
  
“If you’re tired - ” says Remus, and drops the towel over the edge of the sink with his other hand. “Go on and - ”   
  
“Fine,” he mutters, and pushes off from the wall; he drops the fistful of Remus’s jumper to push his hair back from his face (which is damp and hot and feeling all sorts of twisty anger and incredulity, at the moment). “Christ.”   
  
Remus is silent, but he can hear the click of the light extinguished, and the way even Remus’s breathing hesitates, at the threshold.   
  
“I don’t know what - ” says Sirius, standing in the dark, and he can’t believe he’s said that, that he would ever say that, so he stops.   
  
Remus is silent; the place where his body was, before the light went out, is darker than the rest of the world (the way quill marks will press through sheets of paper).   
  
“Fuck,” says Sirius. “What fucking time is it.”   
  
“I don’t know,” murmurs Remus – Sirius can feel his body fumbling in the dark air, his shoulder bumps Sirius’s arm when he brushes past. “Four, maybe? I’m sorry, I couldn’t sleep.”   
  
“That couch, it is,” he mumbles. “That fucking couch, if you ever let me sleep there again – Christ.”   
  
“Sorry,” says Remus, again, and there is the brief sound of his smile, and the heavy croak of the couches springs, when he sits. “Wasn’t thinking.”   
  
“Well, should hope not,” Sirius grunts, and tries not to stub his toe on the ottoman, again. It doesn’t sound nearly as lecherous as he’d planned. “Considering.”   
  
“Didn’t mean to wake you,” says Remus, in response, which means, actually, I’d rather not let’s talk about how I just came in your mouth and all over your trousers, ta.   
  
“Forget it,” says Sirius. “You look like shit, by the way.”   
  
Remus laughs, and it is almost bright, it is so vaguely surprised. “I know,” he says.   
  
“And you need a fucking haircut,” says Sirius. “Almost choked me.”   
  
“I know,” says Remus.   
  
Which means, Are you all right.   
  
Which means, I don’t know.   
  
Which means, You’re beautiful.   
  
Which means, I don’t know.   
  
“Oi, Lupin,” he says, which is what it is, in the dark.   
  
Remus puts a hand on his thigh, palm down, and pats his knee, twice.   
  
It is so lovely and stupid and awkward, thinks Sirius, you probably worked up the courage to do that for four hours, didn’t you, he thinks.   
  
He looks at the place in the shadows where Remus’s wrist rests against his leg, grey and fuzzy. He thinks about taking it in his hand, about cupping it in his palm and sliding his fingers up Remus’s arm to the cool, blue-veined inside of Remus’s elbow, of leaning over and pressing Remus back against the couch again with both his knees. He thinks about tucking his nose into the front of Remus’s jumper, which he knows is warm and wooly and sometimes damp with sweat or rain or snow, or dry like book-leaves, and how it would feel to have Remus’s odd and pointy chin digging into his temple, and Remus’s jaw and throat and heartbeat against his face, to have Remus’s body cupping his. He thinks about whispering in his ear. He thinks, if he could get inside, there, it would be very warm, and maybe it would be a fine place to have a good cry, if that was the sort of thing he wanted to do.   
  
And it could be this, he thinks. It could be this, in one moment: he could turn his head and touch his mouth to Remus’s temple and he could say I like this and Don’t leave me and I’ve been good, you know, haven’t I, and I just want to be, you know, whatever it is that you, which is all one thing, which is all one thing that comes down to, well, he thinks, that. It could be this, and he would stop Remus from laughing, somehow, he would force him to see, to just keep on beside him, no matter what.   
  
Remus takes his hand away, and it is like the air has gone warm and thick around them, like a heavy fog in London, in the middle of the summer (when you can’t breathe, thinks Sirius, because there is no more room in your lungs what with all the car horns and jingle-bells of ice cream shops and saturated sunsets and currysmells and hot concrete and venting steam).   
  
And it is this, now: Remus takes his hand away, and they are sitting sidebyside in the dark, thinking of each others’ bodies, and how the most terrifying thing was that this was the terror they had: that in the early morning, sitting sidebyside, Sirius would say Oi, Lupin, and Remus would take his hand away, and then Remus would say, Tea would you like some I was just about to anyway, and Sirius would say Yeah, sure, that he would say, Ta, and Remus would stand, and there would be clinking in the kitchen.  And Sirius would smoke his last cigarette with his tongue wrapped around the air and the unspoken bits of them, floating like a piece of the moon missing, sitting sidebysidebyside with no one in the dark.  
  
You are, he thinks, so close to trembling; furious and tired and ill with all these stupid, insane things (like windswept, expired churches with dead people in them, and the other side of bed when it is empty, and the way he’s sure now that he had wanted to stand in the line of fire because he knew how much Remus loved regret), all rattling about underneath his skin.   
  
At least you’re going to miss me, when I go?   
  
  

\--  


  
  
He spends the entirety of the summer on the southern coast, in the house that Aunt Lucretia vacated when she became a Prewett, because Father has fallen ill, and though he would never say it, Regulus knows he greatly enjoys the air that comes in off the ocean, and it is all generally agreed that it is good for one’s health, if one is past the age of being fed foul-smelling potions and bled out by leeches.   
  
Regulus also knows that Father despises leeches.   
  
I don’t want them please, he’d said, when he was six. And Father touched the top of his hand with his big, dry palm, until Kreacher came with the Apothecarist.   
  
Mother is in London (her skin has a dryness lately; she looks very old, and very deep and angry), and Father rests all day in the big wooden rocking chair by the bay windows, which face south over the sandy-coloured cliffs and the water, and take in all the air, and Regulus sits at the writing desk and reads, until the sun goes past the curtains, and he asks Poufsy, who also came with the house, to please bring up the supper.   
  
The air in the house smells like old dust and fresh lemons, every morning, and it mixes with the air off the ocean, which smells like hot, preserved sunshine and fresh, salty blood, and it all gathers in the spores of the wool robe which Father wraps around his shoulders (this smells vaguely of coal and earth, and slow illnesses).   
  
He listens to the sound of Father breathing, and it sounds so much like the ocean, in the distance, expanding and contracting with itself, so much like the sound of all the empty, breathing houses that he is used to, that after a few weeks – though he is not sure when, exactly – he stops hearing it.   
  
He stops hearing it, and so it stops, altogether.   
  
This death, he thinks, standing in front of the rocking chair, is very different from that other one.   
  
I don’t think that I would have liked for this one to happen, he thinks, at all.   
  
I don’t think this is fair, he thinks, and the ocean air rocks the chair, and sets the house smelling of lemons and earth and dried coal-salt again.   
  
I would have liked to save you, he thinks, and goes downstairs to tell Poufsy to please pack up the trunks, please – they will be going back to London in the morning.  
  
  

\--  
  
  
“Evans, looking quite a bit, there,” he says, and hovers his hands in front of his own belly, palms in.   
  
“You told him, then?” she calls into the garden through the open window, where James is throttling a gnome with the rotted stalk of a morning glory.   
  
“What? Er - ” calls James. “Fucking – nuttering bugger, bugger, buggering - ” and the gnome hits him with an onion bulb. “What?”   
  
“Well,” says Sirius. “He did, that.”   
  
“It’s three weeks along,” says Lily, smirk like a slow flame curl. “I’m not going to be a quite a bit there for a while yet.”   
  
“It sounds more original than ‘congratulations’,” says Sirius, and picks at an invisible crumb on the tablecloth.   
  
Lily pulls a face. “It does, that.”   
  
“You talk like him, now,” grins Sirius.   
  
Lily leans back against the counter, and looks at him, and the sunlight is cold-looking, but it hits her cheekbones and the curve of her neck and the way her hair is tucked back behind her ear in a way that makes it all seem lit and heated from the inside-out. She will be a good sort of mum, he thinks.   
  
“Hm,” she says, and smiles at him.   
  
“You’re making me nervous. Evans,” he squints at her, elbows teetering on the table edge, because he is fairly sure he cansee it, whatever it is, even if he was taking the piss before, then, he’s quite sure there’s something quite different.   
  
“I certainly hope so,” she says, and grins – it shows her teeth and gets tossed over her shoulder when she glances back into the garden, where James has succeeded in at least swearing the gnome into relative quiet.   
  
“Er,” he says, and thinks again that she will be a very good sort of mum, clearly.   
  
“I don’t see why you’re so terrified,” she says, happily, lacing her fingers over her belly, gently, and that bitch, thinks Sirius,she did that on purpose.   
  
“Oh, the hell you don’t,” he snorts, and rubs at his forehead with his wrists.   
  
She laughs, and James yells a garbled whoop of victory (there is the sound of his boots, mud and all on the stones of the garden path).   
  
“You’re planning something awful,” he hisses, as the door squeaks on its hinges, and James comes tromping through the kitchen, trailing mud and vines, and smelling a little like garlic and overly-dead potpourri.   
  
“Wash your face,” says Lily.   
  
“Babysitting,” snarls Sirius. “What the hell, if you even - ”   
  
James grins, teeth flashing white and predatory behind a smear of dirt. “Ah. Ah. It gets so much worse, dear Padfoot.”   
  
“Oh my god,” he says.   
  
James laughs, and comes at him with big, muddy palms and vine-covered fingers. “Ha ha ha – you sound like Lupin, you great nonce!”   
  
“We’ll take tea outside, then,” says Lily, and subtly trips up the legs of Sirius’s chair, so he topples into the muddiest, earthiest, foul-smelling headlock of his life. “So I can get at you both with the garden hose.”   
  
“Your wedding was more – augh - fun!” Sirius squawks, and succeeds only in the escape of his left cheek out from under James’s armpit. “Can’t you do anything properly!”   
  
“Our wedding was lovely!” James tightens his elbow, pointedly. “Blasphemy – heathen!”   
  
“Well, no. It was rather awful,” says Lily. “For him.”   
  
“Nghhaghgle,” says Sirius, because James has stuffed his pointy, onion-smelling knee up into the soft underside of Sirius’s chin.   
  
And the sun is setting when they are dry-and-clean again, sitting on the bottom step with their legs outstretched into the grass, when Lily calls, “Peter’s here!” from the upstairs window.   
  
So you’ll do it, asks James.  Couldn’t be anyone else. You know.   
  
Fuck you, says Sirius. I don’t care. I hate children. Ask me again in nine fucking months.   
  
Fine, says James, and he is still laughing when he stands to go inside.   
  
Fine, says James, I will. 

\--

"Sorry," says Remus, tugging at his sleeves, ash clouding up from his skin like smoke. "Sorry, I'm late."   
  
"Look, mate, it's kind and all, but you didn't have to bring every chimney in London with you," says James, patting a little futilely at his back, and Peter coughs, when he laughs and sucks in a lung of ash instead of air.   
  
Remus makes an apologetic half-shrug (all in his awkward, skinny elbows), and gingerly avoids the furniture, and Sirius forgets, very quickly, like he always does, that this boy is anything but an awful, awful, ashy mess just barely held together by the fact that they all happen to be just barely held together by each other, too, and that usually someone has a cigarette or a cup of tea or a crack at your mum when it's needed.   
  
"Eugh," rasps Peter, rubbing at his red eyes. "Will you please kill whoever's floo you've just come from?"   
  
Sirius kicks Peter in the shin, and smiles through his teeth at the glare he gets. "I've made you a sandwich," he says to Remus, nudging the plate toward the edge of the table with his elbow, because he feels that if his fingers get too close, they will have to curl up into Remus's beltloops and straighten out his collar, entirely of their own accord.   
  
" _I_  made him a sandwich," calls James, over his shoulder, from the kitchen.   
  
" _I_  saved it for you," Sirius protests, and Peter rolls his eyes.   
  
"Er," says Remus, and hovers, still clouding ash. "Thank you."   
  
"Oh, for - would you get him a towel?" Sirius shouts over his shoulder, to James.   
  
"On it - ” James appears again long enough to throw a damp cloth in their general direction, and glare – “Moony,  _sit down_ already, we'll just clean it up later," – before he disappears behind the door again.   
  
Remus sighs, and takes a seat on the edge of the cushion, beside Sirius, patting distractedly at the dark streaks on his arms. “You’ve heard, then,” he asks, glancing up at Peter.   
  
“Mmh,” Peter nods, glancing at the kitchen door. “Not that there’s much to, you know.”   
  
Remus frowns, and wipes at the underside of his wrist, which turns the skin pink and makes Sirius’s mouth irritatingly dry. “Has Dumbledore - ?”   
  
“Not yet,” James says, a mug of tea in his hands. “Milk?”   
  
“Er,” says Remus, apparently daunted by the sudden appearance of Early Grey, and Sirius wants to tug at his hair or his collar or grab him by the face with both hands and shake him soundly, until that eerie distractedness (quite a step more than simple professorial faffing about, thinks Sirius) has been wiped off his glazed eyes, like ash.   
  
“Yes, milk,” snaps Sirius, and snatches the damp cloth from Remus’s stilled hands. “Would you – just. Give it here.  _Give it_. You’re pants at this.”   
  
James pours the milk, and Peter steeples his fingers under his chin, and Sirius wipes at Remus's cheek until the skin is clean and pink and the edges of his odd nose still smudged with a little bit of ash, and Remus makes a tight noise, that is not entirely from the fact that Sirius is scrubbing at his neck with a cold, damp cloth.   
  
"People are scared," he says, finally.   
  
"People?" asks Peter, leaning his chin forward slightly, into his hands.   
  
"People out there," says Remus, with a one-handed sort of gesture. "In Diagon, in the villages - they're terrified."   
  
James frowns, and Sirius barely resists the urge to stuff said cold, damp cloth into Remus's ear.   
  
"They won't even say his name," says Remus, finally. "Don't we realize how  _dangerous_  that is?"   
  
"I think we were made aware of that quite a while ago, ta," murmurs James, sitting on the edge of the table.   
  
"I want to say I believe that Dumbledore has it under control, but I - " Remus pauses, and there is an old weight in the air, like the clunk of porcelain on a thick rug.   
  
"You don't trust him?" asks Peter, quietly, and it makes Sirius uncomfortable, because usually he just sounds like he's worried, and this doesn't entirely sound like that at all.   
  
"No, no, that's not," Remus sighs, brow furrowed. "That's not at all what I meant."   
  
"If we can't trust him," says James.   
  
"I know," Remus insists. "I  _know_. But."   
  
"But, no," says James, voice as straight as his mouth, and Remus looks up at him sharply, lips still slightly open, and Sirius is convinced that he was just about to speak without thinking, first, maybe, perhaps, for the first time in his bloody life.   
  
"Be suspicious as the next Muggle Marvin, for all I care, but don't go badmouthing - "   
  
"James," Remus frowns, sharply. "Why would I - "   
  
"Spent all day at the Ministry," explains Peter. “He’s been – ”   
  
"Oi. Come off it, Pete," James sighs, and pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and fingers.   
  
"It's just that we know so little already," Remus insists, palm open on his thigh, leaning forward over his knees like he used to in the dormitories after dark, with the curling edges of the Map whispering at their bare ankles, and his slim, dark wand vaguely elegant and mesmerizing with its pure practicality, and the way he smiled then, because he  _had_  to trust them with his secrets, if not his skin.   
  
"But if we can't believe in Dumbledore," says Peter, quietly. "Then what's the point?"   
  
"That's not," Remus murmurs, and pauses. "Peter. It's only that I'm worried he doesn't know any more than we do."   
  
James looks at Sirius over Remus's head, and since it makes his stomach sort of tight and twisty with guilt, Sirius presses the back of his hand against Remus's hip, knuckles curled just against the pocket, between them.   
  
Remus makes a fist with one hand, on his knee, and Sirius can tell by the way his eyes are lidded, by the subtle sort of shift in his spine and how he holds his neck, that for some odd, terrifying, thrilling, unfamothable reason, Remus Lupin is either on the verge of raising his voice, punching someone in the face, or turning right there in the middle of James and Lily's sitting room, and kissing Sirius violently on the mouth, until Sirius can't even taste his own tongue anymore.   
  
Why does it always make you so angry that I want you, thinks Sirius, and stands to get himself more tea.   
  
"Of course he knows more," he hears Peter say. "That's the  _point_ , isn't it? Isn't that the  _problem,_  here?"   
  
He can hear the sigh in James's voice. "What's that, eh."   
  
"Who knows what," says Peter, almost too low for Sirius to catch.   
  
"Oh, fuck  _off_ , Pete," he calls from the kitchen, almost burning his tongue on the hot tea (he drinks it too quickly, to keep his heart down in his chest where it should be, not floating around somewhere in his throat).   
  
"Er," says Peter, and has the good grace to look guilty when Sirius glares at him from the doorway, even if it is over a mug of tea, and not particularly threatening.   
  
Remus threads his fingers together, in his lap (the damp towel is folded there, over his knees, and Sirius can see the places where he has smoothed it out; his own benign bad habit). He has been thinking without pause, for days, thinks Sirius, worrying his thoughts between his teeth and twisting them into all the hairline cracks of his everyday actions and everynight dreams. You can see it in the way his eyes don’t focus on anything or anyone, he thinks, the way Remus stares at the empty space between James’s shoulder and Peter’s stupid cowlicked-bowl haircut as if it were carrying on a conversation on the importance of archival paper treatments in medieval spell re-creation.  _Rot_ , thinks Sirius.  _Utter fucking rot, all of it._    
  
“Bugger this,” says James, and gives his hair a twisted sort of tug, for good measure.   
  
“You need a drink, mate,” says Peter.   
  
“I need to  _kick Voldemort in the shins_ ,” says James, sharply. “I need dump something vile over his head to turn his skin blue and itchy, and I need to snag his great smelly underpants and fly ‘em up the flagpole, so we can all have a good one, and he learns his bloody  _place_. Is what I  _need_.”   
  
Oh my god, thinks Sirius.  _I know._    
  
“And to think,” murmurs Remus. “Why didn’t we try that to begin with?”   
  
“Sirius - ” James laughs, his forehead pressed to his palm, “ - Sirius and I maintain an army of hellions at Hogwarts, you know, ready to do our dastardly bidding. Maybe now’s – maybe now’s the proper time, and all.”   
  
“You mobilize your  _own_  troops,” Sirius says, still feeling twisty and sick-ish, all over his body, inside his own skin; he can’t stop looking at Remus, can’t stop filling out all the missing words and pauses and movements with the worst possible answer. His voice feels very far aware from his own body. “Mine defected after the Great Thingy of That Day At Supper, or summat.”   
  
“House elves are,” says Remus, and Sirius feels a knot throttle in his gut, at the smile. “I’m afraid, not much match for – “   
  
“I got the First Years,” says James, with a wicked, rueful sort of grin. “We have an  _army of eleven-year-olds._ ”   
  
“Er. Maybe we’d better hold off on that, yet,” says Peter, hoarsely, and they all see Edgar Bones, thinks Sirius, don’t we.   
  
“Christ, Pete,” hisses James. “My mood was  _improving_.”   
  
“Sorry.” Peter makes a weak movement with his hands. “Er.”   
  
Sirius thinks about going home and pulling all the blankets over his head. He thinks about doing what James was only half-joking around with, about going at them all with a round of farting plastic bats and blue paint, and dungbombs. He thinks about the sounds he knows now that he didn’t think he really understood before, and how much he just  _hates_ them: James’s voice breaking, the heavy, sticky silence like enormous cloying drapes, the way a dead body hits the snow, the way fear gets in your ears and makes your head sting with high-pitched bells, the sound of Remus getting out of bed, trying not to wake him, trying not to disturb a hair of this tenuous, tremulous thing he has  _no hand in_. It’s not my fault, he thinks, he wants to say.  _It’s not my fault_ , I just want to I just want I don’t even fucking know.   
  
“Just a moment,” he hears Remus murmur. “I need to send an owl. To Dumbledore?”   
  
“Fauntleroy’s upstairs,” says James, with a distracted sort of nod. “Pete, go make yourself  _useful_ , clean up that fucking mess of teabags you made, eh, or something.”   
  
And, like that, the room is empty; it is suddenly empty; it is just he and James and James and he, sitting slumped and silent, offset across the carpet. James is watching him, and he is watching James’s left shoulder, thin and bony and nervy, and someone has wrung his body dry. Someone has taken all his skin, and pulled it tighter than it should be, someone has squeezed and twisted and melted-down his ribs like old, hot metal; they sit higher in his chest and pinch and burn at his lungs. Someone has made his blood thicker; his pulse is heavy and slow and he feels every thrust of it up and down and up and down his arms and legs and throat and groin and belly and up into his head like a pounding halo. I don’t know where I am, he thinks, and he is almost shivering with it, he feels the cold creeping in. Fuck, he thinks, someone’s fucking stolen that too.   
  
“What,” says James. “Pads.”   
  
“I’m  _losing_ it,” he laughs. “What do I.”   
  
“Shite,” James snorts. “That’s a. You’re  _not_.”   
  
“Sure,” he sneers. “Sure, why not?  _Look at this_.”   
  
“Pads,” says James.   
  
“I dunno,” he says. “I just.”   
  
“Right,” says James. “No, I know. I  _know_. All right?”   
  
“Because you love her?” he asks, suddenly, and he knows, god,  _it’s all I’ve been thinking about_ , and James looks at him, and he looks at James’s left shoulder. The jangling oddity of his own limbs, his own thoughts, his own eyes and ears and lips and hands, don’t go away – he thought they might, he thought it might be that cure, you know, he thinks, to say it like that, if I meant it like  _this_ , maybe it would fix every wrong thing in the world.   
  
“Yeah,” says James, finally, soft and slow and genuine. This is his Father Voice, thinks Sirius, so he’s probably right, like the good ones are. “Yeah. Exactly.”   
  
He thinks about the stairs; Remus has just gone up them. He thinks about the feel of the railing under his palm, if he slid his fingers along it, how it would feel, smooth and sun-warmed, and full of all the places where people have paused there: to call ahead, to turn back, to bend and pick up a child, to take them two-three-at-a-time, to lean down and kiss someone, two stairs apart. He thinks about the time he climbed them, one summer, when his hair was damp with rain and his face was damp with rain and his eyes stung with rain and, well, he thinks, other things, too. He had a scrape on his palm, raw skin and harsh, red pain sliding along the railing, which was smooth and cool with the evening, and James was at the top of the stairs, in his pajamas, saying, Well,  _hullo_. And they sat at the top of the stairs, where James had been standing (he crouched beside him when he sat, to cover the fact that his knees were watery and giving-out sort of weak in the joints). So they sat, at the top of the stairs, and watched the evening grow longer over them, and James said, I got a new broom, and Sirius said, Go on, not the  _Nimbus_ , and James said Oh,  _yeah_ , and Sirius said  _Go on_ , and James said, Haven’t rode it yet, want to give it a go tomorrow.   
  
“Right,” he says.   
  
“Right, I’ll. I’ll be right back,” he says.   
  
And he goes to take the stairs.

  


\--  


  
  
Remus is standing on the juliette balcony, outside what-was-Mr.Potter’s-study, small and narrow and iron-wrought; and the owl is long gone. He is standing with his back to the door, and Sirius pauses to watch him exhale slow smoke into the air, wrists crossed over the railing, fingers lax and white, a weak hand-rolled cigarette dangling. It means he has taken more time to cultivate his bad habits, thinks Sirius, and he thinks,  _not really a good sign, then_.   
  
“Vagrant,” he says, by Remus’s ear, and Remus’s shoulder twitches, startled.   
  
“Shite,” he murmurs, and exhales, chin tilting up and back when Sirius clambers through the window. “You’re  _one_  of those sneak-attacks away from a throat-full of hexes.”   
  
“You’re just jumpy,” scoffs Sirius, and rests his elbows firmly on the iron railing, feeling the bite of the metal and the vague heat of Remus’s forearms beside his own.   
  
“Mm,” mumbles Remus, and rubs at the back of his neck with his free hand, smearing the last remnants of ash along his nape, above his jumper collar. “I’m not. Don’t worry.”   
  
“You,” says Sirius. “Christ, you have soot in your ear, how the sodding – you have soot in your  _ear_.”   
  
“Ah,” Remus says, the visible curve of his cheek vaguely pink, his voice vaguely distracted; his fingers curl inwards to tug at the edge of his jumper-sleeve. “It was a very old floo?”   
  
“Bloody  _where_  – Christ - ” he plucks at Remus’s shoulder seam, and a sad little puff of dust hangs in the air.  “It’s like you bathed in it.”   
  
“Bathing would be lovely,” says Remus, distractedly.   
  
“I’ll bet it would, that,” mutters Sirius, and dares a press of his nose against the slip of skin behind Remus’s ear, in the soft part of his throat, even with the window open behind them. “Tongue-bath?”   
  
Remus’s body seems to squirm automatically, even though his hand doesn’t  _quite_  make it to Sirius’s chest, to push him off. “You – disgusting, Pads.”   
  
“Ha- _ha_ ,” he huffs, and presses his luck. “But you thought canine too, didn’t you, you great  _pervert_.”   
  
Remus’s shoulder shifts just under his chin, and mutters something indistinct.   
  
“Christ, you could work up a little enthusiasm,” he snaps, pulling away, a sour taste growing under his tongue.   
  
“Leave it,” says Remus (the high, tight curve of his neck makes it an  _almost_ -plea).   
  
“Oi, c’mon. I’ll only ask once – you know, boggart in your cupboard?” Sirius grins, ignoring him, watching a pigeon wheel awkwardly up into the sky.  “Under your sink? Amongst your dainties?”   
  
“Only in my sheets,” grins Remus, teeth bared, and Sirius satisfies himself by flicking Remus in the ear.   
  
“Oi, that’s hardly fair,” he says. “Just because you think you can get away with that kind of trash talk, but your know your poor self-esteem would never recover if I named  _you_  and your  _orgasms_  my bloody boggart.”   
  
“Er,” says Remus.   
  
“Oh, stuff it,” mutters Sirius, cross and overheated and rather trodden-on, altogether. “So I happen to – you know. I like that, er. Look, I’m not after your fucking  _sensibilities,_ Lupin _,_ all right _._ ”   
  
Remus’s eyes narrow, very slightly, and they catch the edge of the sun, and he does not speak.   
  
“ _You_  kissed  _me_ ,” says Sirius, because he has never said it before.   
  
Remus closes his eyes, with the cigarette against his mouth, when he inhales. When he breathes out again, he says, “Well. Yes.”   
  
“Ah - he  _remembers_ , glory-glory,” Sirius hisses, and wrings his fists over the railing, fitful strangling.   
  
“That’s not,” says Remus. “That’s not funny, of course I. You’re ridiculous.”   
  
“You have soot in your ear,” Sirius hisses, peevishly.  “Let’s not talk about ridiculous, shall we.”   
  
Remus exhales into his laugh, and his face is turned away into the cooling sky, and Sirius has the sudden urge to dig his fingers hard into that curve of cheek, to drag them both back into the land of the insane and oblivious, to huddle together under the bed, like they did for two days straight when they were eleven (until Remus made the executive decision that if the lethifold was going to get them, it would probably remember to look under the bed, and anyway he was tired of eating things that tasted like dust, and they should probably come out eventually, at least to change their socks).   
  
“Augh,” he says, and feels his ribs give a creaking, empty heave – as if they know how nostalgia is so different from real  _want_ , after all.  “Where the hell,” he says, and it feels a little like giving in.  “Where did you go, anyway.”   
  
Remus’s body shifts, like a sharp interruption (the way he could always redirect Sirius’s train of thought by a subtle adjustment of his chin, or his mouth, or a rearrangement of his fingers on a bookleaf or poised over their living parchment. Or, when he would be sleeping, and his spine would curl slightly, his left knee would bend a little, his heartbeat would hold the downbeat like a spliced legato, and Sirius’s first thought would be that the world was ending, before he could remember where he was, before he could remember that the best solution was not to think at all). Remus’s shoulders readjust in the narrow iron space, and his neck tilts away from Sirius, when he exhales, and his fingers rub against the end of the cigarette.   
  
“Just Kent,” says Remus, finally.  “More of my da’s things.  Furniture.  Some debts.”   
  
“I wrote you,” says Sirius (instead of offering what he  _really_ thinks, because he doesn’t know if it will be skepticism or more of the utterly incoherent laughter that has been boiling in the bottom of his belly for weeks, now).   
  
And Remus chuckles, once, in the back of his throat, as if he is startled.  “Come off it, Pads,” he says.  "You make a horrible romantic  hero."   
  
“Oh, what.”  Sirius snorts, tucking his chin down against the thin collar of his shirt – it’s  _cold_ , he thinks, my face is  _frozen_.   
  
“And you were what, exactly,” says Remus, with an odd sort of smile in his voice.  “Going to tuck it under my pillow, waiting patiently for my valiant return?”   
  
He makes a fist.  He can’t  _stand_  it.   
  
Remus is still.  “What,” he murmurs.   
  
You used to need me, he thinks.   _When did this become a fucking joke._    
  
“Padfoot?” says Remus, and flicks the end of his cigarette over the edge, and the orange bloom goes out before it arcs below the iron railing.   
  
“Does it still scare you?” he says, because he can’t stop himself, now.   
  
“No,” says Remus.  “Er, what?”   
  
He frowns, and supposes if this is the place where they're going to hash it out, then this may as well be it, he thinks, you know, the kind of thing that's going to get out of hand, very quickly.     
  
“It did,” he says, slowly, fingers still twisting the rail.  “Then.  It scared you before, you know.  Either that no one would ever look at you, you know, or that someone wouldn’t  _stop_  looking, you know, Christ.  Christ, how did you  _think_  like that?  It’s completely – there’s not a drop of logic.”   
  
And Remus goes silent, and still, which means that he is too wary to open his own mouth and fill in the blanks, the “proper” response, thinks Sirius, before someone else gets nervous, and goes ahead and does it for him.   
  
“Does it still scare you,” he asks again.   
  
“Look, stop talking in circles,” Remus says, abruptly.  “Either say it, or don’t, I’m not in the mood to play this.  These.  This isn’t a game, and I’m.  I should know better.  I  _know_  you know better.”   
  
“ _Nobody_  knows ‘ _better’_ ,” he snaps.  “You – you don’t even believe it yourself, why the hell are you pinning it on - ”   
  
“Sirius,” says Remus, sharply.  “Are you even listening to yourse - ”   
  
“You  _are_ terrified,” Sirius hisses, and it’s almost like he wants to crow with it.  “Aren’t you, because you can’t bloody hide from the fact that  _nobody know what they’re doing_.  And,  _oh god_ , we must all be doomed, because you can’t fucking figure out how to put your head on in the morning, can you.”   
  
“This is a stupid - ” says Remus, forcibly soft.  “This is stupid.”   
  
“If we left you,” he hisses, and Remus’s palm is dry and hot, suddenly squeezed between his fingers.  “If we said we’d had enough.”   
  
Remus’s eyes narrow, there is a sharp pulse underneath Sirius’s wrist, under his knuckles and palm.  “What’s – ”   
  
“Doesn’t that fucking scare you.”  And it hurts something deep inside his torso, like his ribs have squeezed too tightly at his mushy, useless organs, in an effort to get more anger in.   
  
“If there’s some sort of  _proper_ response to this, I’m not aware of what it could be.”  Remus’s fingers squeezes against his own, and Remus’s gaze flickers back and forth between the open window - the butter-light and the smell of tea – and the shadows where they are.   
  
“Doesn’t that fucking scare you anymore?”   
  
“I don’t know what that  _means_ , Sirius, if you - ”   
  
“Fuck you,” Sirius mutters, and drops his hand.  “You know. You know  _exactly_  what that means, you – ”   
  
“It means that I,” says Remus, and stops, full stop, like the expanse of the world is too big to let him finish; it swallows the words right out of his throat.   
  
“Fuck this,” Sirius spits.  “I’ve fucking told you, I’ve  _told_ you, I don’t fucking care, anymore, all right?”   
  
“I can’t  _keep_  you,” snaps Remus, suddenly – a crack of air, a wick of heat against Sirius’s cheek.  “Look, I could do what you want - I could do everything you want, and.  It wouldn’t keep you.  I could try, but it wouldn’t – that’s not, you know I never could.  How on earth could I – ” 

  
“That’s – fucking, fucking rot,” he snarls, but he can’t finish it.  He doesn’t know.  He  _can’t_  know, and isn’t that, he thinks, isn’t that the part they’re terrified of, he thinks, isn’t that it?  “You’ve got every – ”  
  
“ _Nothing_.  I’ve got – ” Remus’s voice is curled upward on the edges, like a corner of parchment caught on fire, and crumbling, his wrists are white and braced against the railing, elbows locked, shoulders straight.  “Nothing.  Well.  Isn’t that.  Isn’t that your point?”  
  
“No,” he says.   _Yes_ , he thinks. _I don’t know._ “Fuck you, no.”  
  
“But _you_  can say it," says Remus, command made weak by the slow darkness.    
  
“That doesn’t – ” he wants to  _strangle_  something.  “It won’t change anything.  You’ll still be – and I’d – ”  
  
"Prove it," says Remus, soft (like the inside curve of a wrist, of shaking skin and the numbed scrape of stone against his spine).   “ _I_  kissed  _you_  – ” it echoes, it comes out slow, as if it doesn’t believe itself.  “ – remember?”  
  
If I were asleep, thinks Sirius. If I didn't think I knew what was happening, and I didn't have the memory, you know, of what salt tastes like, what blood tastes like, what, you know, it means that I have to  _work so hard_  sometimes and I still think sometimes I just think that way so I don't have to work at all anymore, not because I think of you or him or him or us and if my hands weren't still shaking and I wasn't a fucking, fucking coward, if I were daydreaming in this space instead, and you were still that little boy I could take with me anywhere, anywhere, could trust to be just there, always. You were supposed to be, he thinks.  Weren’t you supposed to be the one that needed me?  
  
“Why,” he says.  “You  _did_ , all right.  So.  Why?”  
  
“You wanted me to,” says Remus, a flash of a flickered grin, edged, a shaking smear of light.  “A challenge, wasn’t it?”  
  
“ _Of course I wanted it_ ,” he turns; he wants to smack Remus across the head, it’s so  _stupid_ , it’s just wrong.   
  
“I mean,” says Remus, and looks vaguely stunned, like his teeth won’t wrap around it, and his jaw won’t move, and his joints are jammed together wrong, and  _huh_ , thinks Sirius,  _well.  I know that one_.  “I mean – I.”  
  
He presses his palm to the side of Remus’s face. Like a stamp, a seal, the ash seeping into skin. He presses his palm there, Remus has his fingers curled in the air between them. His knuckles brush the front of Sirius’s shirt, and his eyes flick downwards, eyebrows knit briefly. There is something missing, thinks Sirius. And we all know it too. There should be, he thinks. We should be standing in a stairwell in Gryffindor Tower.  There should be wool under my fingers, he thinks, and you should be furious with me, he thinks, and there should be stone and candlelight and we should be.  We should be making this choice again, and maybe, one time, you'll punch me in the jaw, instead of kissing me on the mouth.  And maybe, another time, you'll kiss me, but never do it again.  And maybe, one time, you'll just speak to me.  And if we knew, he thinks,  _If I knew what you were thinking --_  
  
“Sirius?” Peter calls from down the stairs, his voice echoing.   
  
“Yeah,” Sirius calls, and drops his hand. “On it, mate.”   
  
Remus’s fingers, flex, once; he pulls them back. He looks up. He still has ash on his face, and one corner of his mouth tilts upward, slightly.   
  
I don’t know this one, thinks Sirius, is this how he looks when he’s  _finally_  fucking caved. I didn’t think to study this. And then, from somewhere,  _Is that it, then?_    
  
“Later, then,” says Remus.   
  
Sirius touches his shoulder with the tips of his fingers, as he slips by.   _Later.  Of course_.   
  
  

\--  


  
  
"Darling," says Narcissa, setting a teacup and saucer down in front of him. "Here you are."   
  
"Thank you," Regulus murmurs, and picks an errant black thread (from his robes: they are dark wool with picot on the hems, the whole set of them a present for his last birthday, from Italy) from the lace tablecloth. They are taking tea in the sunroom, where the floor is cool white marble, and the tabletop is quartz, with iron legs curved like the heavy curlicues of cigar smoke in languid air. The windows frame the grounds, the charm-bright, searing blue of the sky, how it is in late November; there are billows of white chiffon gathered in at perfect overflowing symmetry, with a cord of slate velvet.   
  
Narcissa is wearing blue silk; there is silver fur at her neck and encircling her wrists, and Regulus is nervous about leaving fingerprints on the porcelain.   
  
"How is your mother?" Narcissa asks, silver sugar tongs held in her hand, tipped like a question mark.   
  
"Mother," he says. "Mother, she's."   
  
"Not ill, again, I hope."   
  
"No," he says. "Oh. No."   
  
The tongs click; there are granules scattered on Narcissa's saucer like shredded glass. "I must say," she says. "I was disappointed. To hear that she had let you leave school."   
  
"I am of age," he murmurs. The words smell strange in his throat and head, mown grass and tiny pufts of perfume from small white flowers arranged on an entrance table (made of maple, sandlewood lace inlays), of the red-ochre scent of the wet clay under the rocks by the river, blackberry ice and cream in the afternoon, the crackle of a thunderstorm and Bella's voice saying how she knew, she knew how to make a spell with that kind of  _ee-leck-tri-suh-tee_.   
  
"Of course," Narcissa smiles, and her eyes are quiet, her white fingers are thin and sure in the air. "And perhaps, even if she had not allowed it."   
  
Once, he and Sirius were caught in the rain in the garden here, hair sopping and collars drooping – they were called in for tea. Sirius tracked warm spattering mud all the way up the marble stairs; when Regulus looked back, there was only one set of footprints, from the shadow of the door to his own body.   
  
"Cissa," he sighs, and she laughs.   
  
"I'm not teasing you," she says. "Why would I tease you?"   
  
"Not about this," says Regulus, carefully, feeling out the shifts in the air that sweep like rustling silk under his shirt sleeves, and make his forearm itch, the skin heavy. "This is - "   
  
"About anything," says Narcissa, and curls both her hands around the curve of the teacup. She smiles; her head tilts. "So solemn. You know I'm very proud of you, darling."   
  
He frowns. He does not know what else to do, so he feels his heart trying to burrow deeper back into his ribs, and it makes him all rather confused and vaguely helpless, all over again.   
  
"Are you going to the country?" he asks, instead.   
  
Narcissa's face has a lovely flush: she looks far less too-thin and sharp at the edges (she was the counterpoint to Bella and her brassy, wild body, even when they were children and tried to braid flowers into Regulus's hair. Even when they are children, thinks Regulus, and try to weave us all together).   
  
"Yes," she says. "Yes, in. In a few weeks, I suppose, when Lucius can comfortably take a few moments away, you know."   
  
Regulus licks the hot tea from the inside of his teeth. "I'm glad," he says, fingers to his mouth.   
  
"Lucius," she smiles. "So insistent. 'London is  _far_  too dreary in the winter,' he says."   
  
"Will you stay – " he asks. " – until?"   
  
Her hand drops beneath the table. Regulus can imagine the swell, the sticky-sweet soft imaginings, the extra heartbeat.   
  
"Yes," she says. "Until."   
  
Regulus thinks she will want a daughter.   
  
And after tea, she arranges a sprig of maple leaves in a vase; there is blue and violet reflecting in her hair. Regulus stands at the window; there is something in this state of being, he thinks, that can make the ugliest autumn sky look something like the fluttering underside of a wing, the soft, hairless wrist of an infant, something nervous and trembling and dreamlike and unsure of its own existence. He misses blinding clarity; Narcissa's glow confuses him, he thinks of school and paints familiarity as daydreams.   
  
Idiot, he thinks. You're in for it now.   
  
There's a curl of cold sunshine on the sill – it makes him think of the way they must look together, in bed, hair the colour of chilled champagne, perfection in every drop of sweat and saliva, and here among the scent of brittle leaves he thinks of Lucius, a helpless addict.   
  
"Darling?" says Narcissa.   
  
"I should go," he says. His hands are shaking in his gloves. "Thank you. For tea."   
  
"Ah, good, Regulus - " Lucius's voice from the doorway sets it all to shattering, quietly, and he cannot regroup, because Narcissa is smiling, and she is in love. "I was hoping you hadn't left."   
  
He is pulling his gloves from his fingers, and his cane is tucked neatly under his arm, and it seems every time Regulus sees him, he has grown taller and his jaw has firmed and his profile has become more solid and perfect.   
  
"Ah," says Regulus. "Yes."   
  
"Join us for supper, won't you?" says Lucius, and holds his hand out to Narcissa. They are smiling at him, and all he can think of is how Kreacher's fingers felt against his wrist and palm, and how sure he is that they have known every thought he has ever had. Sirius did, he thinks, Sirius did and he never loved me then, because he knew. He knew I wasn't right because he always knew what I needed. Well, he thinks. Well, maybe now.   
  
"Thank you," says Regulus.   
  
"We can have a little chat until then, just us boorish men, mm?" murmurs Lucius, and his hand is like air on Regulus's shoulder.   
  
Regulus makes sure to close the door behind them; the sound swallows up the sunlight. He thinks of empty houses.   
  
Well, he thinks, in that brief and noiseless void.   
  
Tonight, then.   
  
_If it is not now, it will be never.  
  
  
_

\--  


  
  
"You should get some furniture?" says Peter.   
  
"I've got beer and curry leftovers," says Sirius, peering into the icebox and pointedly ignoring him.   
  
"It's like a House Elf refugee camp, though," says Peter. "Do you honestly just sleep on the floor?"   
  
"Choose one, you can't have both, y'greedy rat," says Sirius, and sniffs a carton of rice before deciding on its relative edibility.   
  
"The armchair's a good start," says Peter. "But you've got too much  _space_."   
  
" _You've_  got too much fucking blah-blah-blah," Sirius snaps, and closes the icebox with his heel, tossing Peter a bottle. "This flat is  _brilliant_."   
  
"Oof, ta. It was brilliant when we were sixteen," says Peter, raising his eyebrows. "Currently, it's just sort of depressing?"   
  
"Look, I don't need it to look like the Taj Mahal to get right and properly pissed, yeah?" Sirius rolls his eyes, and tosses his bottlecap into the sink. "This way, the floor is just closer when you pass out."   
  
"Ah," Peter murmurs. "It was for  _practical_  reasons."   
  
"What," glares Sirius.   
  
"No," says Peter, and smiles with the bottle to his lips. "Nothing."   
  
"Get sloshed or get out," says Sirius, pointedly.   
  
Peter points to his bottle, which is:  _Sloshed_.   
  
They exhaust what’s left of the beer in the icebox, and sit on the floor with the sofa cushions pulled down and the one (incomplete) set of Exploding Snap cards between them, which they don’t really play, and Peter is being an idiot, but Sirius has said it too many times tonight for it to have much weight, any more, considering how drunk they both happen to be.   
  
“Whup,” says Peter, once, righting himself. “Haha – seen Lily recently?”   
  
“Last week,” says Sirius, and thinks of the pink-tinged sun in every room of that fucking, fucking house they live in.   
  
“She’s  _fat_ ,” Peter whispers hoarsely, leaning forward (close-to-toppling again).   
  
Sirius catches him at the shoulders, snorting. “Fucking  _pregnant_ ,” he grins. “Christ.”   
  
“S’odd,” says Peter, appreciatively, sort of distantly appraising of the whole thing, as if it’s a funny-looking animal off in the distance, over Sirius’s shoulder. “Haven’t seen. Not much of Moony lately.”   
  
“Mm,” says Sirius, and throws down a card.   
  
“’m worried,” says Peter. “I – er. About him, I. We should be. Worried?”   
  
Sirius rolls his eyes, and feels like he might fall off his cushion (only that it would be bad form).   
  
“Always, eh,” murmurs Peter.   
  
“Right,” says Sirius. “Play your goddamned hand, or goddamned get out.”   
  
Peter will probably laugh, he thinks, which he does. Peter will probably finish his beer and play his hand and probably almost splinch himself apparating home, which he does, and he will probably wait two more days before bringing it up all again. And Sirius will stand, off-his-head drunk, in the middle of his empty kitchen in the dark, and will have a good laugh, by himself, before he decides to go to bed.   
  
He really doesn't come here very often, now, even though he sleeps here every night. It is odd to be here in the daylight. The flat's walls and spare furniture and the piles of dust in the corners have reconvened to hold him again, he supposes, in that grudging, stubborn way an old friend will always welcome you back, even if against their better fucking judgment. It seems that every day, now, when he wakes and leaves in the morning, just as the sun comes up, he hears a soft inhale, held in hope behind him that today will be the day that he  _won't_  return again after dark, to rattle his keys and kick off his boots and toss his body onto the mattress, to sleep.   
  
"You'd be so lucky," he mutters, to the clanking pipes, and showers in cold water.   
  
There are Memories in the corners, now: little creatures coiled up against the touch of the slatted grey-city light. They blink at him with big, dark eyes and lick at the crumbs of toast scattered on the kitchen floor, and nip at his ankles when he walks by, and make contented hissing noises as he tries to fall asleep, at night. He suspects they must have moved in with the spiders and the doxies and the pigeon that sits on the windowledge, when he wasn't looking. He doesn't mind. They're relatively harmless.   
  
There is one that usually curls into the cushions of the armchair, thrumming quietly to itself like the sound of turning pages. Sometimes, with no warning, it makes a sharp, halting noise, and he has to stop wherever he is and turn to look at it with an involuntary ache welling up in his belly and spine, like a scream. But it is always gone, when he searches for it. And sometimes, it crawls under the blankets to sleep with him, but it is always so silent that it blots out and swallows all his dreams, and usually disappears before morning.   
  
There is one that makes him laugh. It scurries across the floorboards and wriggles up his trouser-leg and clings to his stomach and ribs with sharp little claws; he collapses in hysterics until he can't  _breathe_ and has to gather himself enough to stumble into the loo and splash water on his face and neck.   
  
There was another one that looked like him, but smaller. It had his eyes, but darker. It had his hair, but shorter. It had his mouth and nose, but thinner, paler, and not so loose in the skin. But it had his blood, he thinks.   
  
Once, it stood by the window, and looked at him when he woke up, in the morning. It had a shadow on its skin, like a blurry sleeve of silk. It clasped its hands together in front of itself, and although, he thought, the set of the body was familiar - the narrow shoulders and the straight back and the pointed chin held high in silly imitation and the way it used to tug on the ends of its hair to help it grow longer, faster, before it was made to cut it short all over again - it looked so different from what he thought he was remembering.   
  
Hello, it said.   
  
Uh, he said. Wotcher.   
  
How are you, Sirius? it asked.   
  
Er, all right, yeah, he said, and scratched at the suddenly-dry skin of his wrist. You?   
  
It smiled at him, and all the nerves in his spine gave a sharp, cold jolt. Well, it said. I think I miss you.   
  
Liar, he said, and it had a strange sort of echo in his skull.   
  
No, it said. No, I’m not. I think about you all the time.   
  
Christ, he said, Christ, will you just. What are you.   
  
I don’t know, it said. I don’t know, really.   
  
You never knew anything, ever, he said. Since the day you were fucking born, couldn’t even find your own face, could you.   
  
It unclasped its hands, palms down, against its thighs. It knelt at the end of the mattress, out of the shadows, and it was lit by the dawn shuddering through the window; its skin was ashy and there were lines and dark bruises under its eyes.   
  
I wish, it said, and stopped. It looked down at its knees, up at his face, down at its hands, again. I wish you knew, though, it said.   
  
Knew what, he said, and it rasped in his throat.   
  
It shrugged, spine straight, palms flat. That I wrote you letters, it said. That sometimes I wrote you letters every day. That sometimes I stood in front of your room and waited for you. That when I killed him I thought of you. That the best thing you ever taught me was how to be afraid.   
  
You look fucking ill, he said. You’re too old to look this ill. The last time you looked like this you were a  _child_ , he hissed.   
  
I know, it said. I think I know? I remember that.   
  
You can’t remember that, he said. You had a fever for twelve days.   
  
It was winter, it said.   
  
It was fucking spring, he said.   
  
But you were home, it said.   
  
I hadn’t  _left_  yet, he said. It was the year Grandfather died, and it was Easter, and they dragged me back to that fucking house for two fucking weeks and you were fucking ill the entire fucking time, weren’t you?   
  
You brought me water, it said.   
  
You wouldn’t shut up about it, he said. You kept thinking you could get it yourself, and you couldn’t even sit up in the fucking bed. Couldn’t even sit up, and you thought you’d be fine. Christ.   
  
But, it said softly, and pressed its palm to his knee. I could stand now.  _I could stand now, and be more than this_.   
  
He touched its forehead with his fingers. Its skin was warm, its hair was a little damp, its nose and cheeks and lips were exactly what they should have felt like.   
  
That was how it ended, he said, suddenly. It was you. You were the one that said that then said that to me  _why are you here_.  
  
Did you believe me, then? it asked, against his fingers.   
  
No, he said. But I helped you up, didn’t I. Maybe if I -   
  
You can’t do anything, it said, and took his wrist.   
  
And the words were unfamiliar. They were jarring and odd and they stripped away a filmy layer from the world, from his eyes, from the twisted silver coils of his mind. And he had never heard this voice say  _that_ , before. And something jolted up his spine, and the circle of fingers on his skin was very, very warm, and he could feel the pulse, the one that wasn’t his, and it was one he knew like handwriting: a little rabbity, a little too skittered and off on the downbeat, but it managed to make up for itself, now and then. Because it has my blood, he thought. He twisted his wrist and took the fingers tightly in his own.   
  
I’m sorry, it said, and squeezed his hand. Please don’t worry.  _I’ll show you._    
  
“ _Regulus_?” he hissed. One of them was trembling.   
  
And it quieted him with the whisper of a spell.   
  
And when he woke again, the morning had its proper self about it once more: none of this eerie, sickly light or wandering, speaking shadows, or skin slicked with sweat and guilt and somebody’s name stuffed deep under his tongue, into the fleshy, pulpy parts of his mouth and throat. And when he woke again, he thought:  _Oh_.   
  
Well, he thought. There certainly are a lot Memories in the corners, today. (And aren’t they odd, today.)   
  
But I don’t mind, he thought. They’re harmless, relatively.   
  
And so he realizes, now, that he is glad to have this space. It is his, entirely, and it will watch him, without a single word of judgment, as he consciously casts off the last flakes of his functioning sanity, to mass softly like little bits of dead silver skin, in the sink, in the lining of his leather jacket, in the soles of his shoes, along the windowsill, catching in the cobwebs in the ceiling corners.   
  
(And he throws out the mirror. It has stopped speaking to him, in the mornings.)   
  
 

\--

  
  
He is fully aware of the last two days of his life. Like a gradual loss of hearing, a smartly measured whiting-out of his extraneous senses, he can trace the progression like a slow sickness. His nerves fire with less precision, his speech is slurred at the edges; he has a sharp and prickling ring between his ears. He wakes in the morning of the first day on the edge of a strange ocean, his boots gone and his robes torn, and no recollection of how he had arrived there and no memory of any kind. And he is blind for hours, nothing but dreams playing behind his eyelids and a rattling in his head, as if someone has been inside and gently scraped him clean while he slept. This, he thinks, after he wakes with the taste of blood on his tongue, and his head stuffed full of pain, this is what it is when someone powerful wants you, and wants you destroyed.   
  
And maybe, he thinks. Maybe, I took the easy way out. And maybe now, he thinks, now. For years, now, he has been seeing the ghosts of his brother walking the halls and stairways and ceilings, and he feels Sirius’s skin against his when he sleeps. And now, he wakes, dying, one morning, with a voice vibrating in his skull, sibilant and charming, a golden curl of cream-laced dawn sifting through the thick dark of the seeping water.   
  
_Regulus_ , it says,  _darling, silly child._    
  
“Go away,” he whispers, to the world, and there is a laugh bubbling in the corners of the atmosphere, where the shadows still linger. In the wet plaster of pebbles under his calves, in the knots of an ore vein, in the underside of a snail, the throat of a spider.   
  
_Poor thing_ , it says.  _Did you think you could run? You somehow entertained the thought of_  overpowering me _? And now. Now, sweet Regulus. Can’t even trust your own body._    
  
“You thought  _you_  could,” he hisses.   
  
_Fool_. It slams him back against the ground, the pure  _force_  of the thought, and makes him see thick and bruising stars behind his eyelids, compressing his temples. He gasps, swallowing down a sound, and finds it dizzying and shameful and empowering that all he can think, now, on the verge of pure terror, all he can think is how much Sirius could love him, for this.   
  
For all the fuss about it, he realizes, death is rather a quiet thing. The space above his head grows blue with the slow-rising sun (because the world will continue to turn without him), and there is the soft spitter of rain beginning, isn’t there, and it’s all a little hushed, a little gently paralyzed in its own obliviousness, and it’s all rather beautiful, he thinks, in that it won’t ever really care.   
  
_But I have been_ , he thinks.

  
You have felt me here.

  
  


\--  
  
 

The street is quiet. No. 4 Underwood Road has a green door. Sirius knows Flat 3 (Flat 3., 4 Underwood Rd., scrawled in ink on lonely paper, on the back of postcards and old essays and scavenged scraps of take-away bags); Flat 3 is one story up, to the left. There is an overhead lamp that flickers when you walk past, he knows, just before the landing. There is a sound the door makes when you open it (which is different than the sound the door makes when you know someone is sleeping inside, which is different than the sound the door makes when you press another body up against it, and trip over the threshold because your fingers are caught in the curls of his hair).   
  
But from the street, he does not know which window it is. I never thought, he thinks, to look from the outside.   
  
And the street is quiet. There is a dark blue lorry idling by No 6., there is the aimless clatter of windows and storefronts and trams and people and children and birds and horns and chimneys and trains, around this soft spot of the world, where he has suddenly been by accident.   
  
Well, he thinks.   
  
We live on, I suppose, he thinks.   
  
It’s odd, he thinks, but there are times when he isn’t conscious of himself: just walking, just moving, just raising his wand, and somehow his body will know where to find them. Hazard of association with past company, he thinks, and laughs to himself.   
  
Because the problem with James is that there has been no life without him.   
  
Because the problem with Peter is that he’s always been too easy a target, and there has been no life without him.   
  
Because the problem with Remus is that he has never believed in any sort of happiness, and Sirius knows how his Sunday skin tastes different than his Tuesday skin, and he snores when he sleeps curled up on his right side because his nose was broken once, and there has been no life without him.   
  
Without them, there would be no him, and this would be, he thinks, just a young man laughing to himself, leaning against the corner of the hoover repair shop, which is across from No. 4 Underwood Rd., which has a green door, which opens when Remus Lupin walks out of it.   
  
He watches from the other side of the street as Remus closes the door, adjusts the bag over his shoulder, tucks the folded _Prophet_  under his arm. He knows every inch of skin and fold of fabric, the touch like overwashedsoft cotton and threadyknubbly wool, the sounds like crispwhispers of white sheets in the morning and Remus’s voice sleepy and rubbed a little hoarse at the edges. And the little creases at the corners of Remus’s eyes when he glances across the road, up at the sun, when he starts out down the street.   
  
You aren’t looking for me are you, he thinks.   
  
If you were looking for me anymore, he thinks, you would see me here.   
  
He watches Remus’s back: thin shoulders, strong spine, bowed head and the slip of skin at the nape of Remus’s neck that has made him romantic, murderous, helpless; has made him want to say it all, speak every thick and chewy syllable, press his body to every square inch of it, to shred it up between his fingers and teeth and serrated edges of his own ribs, until they are both able to say:  _well, well, there’s that, then_ , and then disappear. (Because he imagines, sometimes, that that must be what the end of the world is like).   
  
And at the end of the street, Remus turns the corner; he has not once looked back.   
  
And he has not once thought of calling out for him; his name or a sound, or any of the missing words.   
  
And the lorry idles by the curb, and the windows and storefronts and trams and people and children and birds and horns and chimneys and trains all clatter aimlessly as they were clattering aimlessly before, and the world rolls on: all unconcern, and early summer sunshine.   
  
 

\--

  
  
“Is it him,” he asks.   
  
The room is small and dark and smells like beer and goats, and he thinks he should sit, just to settle it all better, to have a drink or two as they all continue to forget this increasing series of spectacular failures and loose strings and beautifully-crafted mistrusts, except all he wants to do is get  _the fucking hell out and kill something_.   
  
“Yes,” says Dumbledore.   
  
“I won’t,” he says. “If they need – I won’t be. I didn’t for my father, and I won’t.  _Not any fucking part of it._ ”   
  
“No need,” growls Moody, from the corner -- and Dumbledore says: “Alastor,  _Alastor_.”   
  
“No need, boy,” says Moody, again. “Did y’honestly think they’d leave a body?”   
  
_Is that what I meant,_ he thinks.   
  
And he says, “Fine, then.”   
  
“Fine,” he says. “That’s fucking fine with me.”  
  
 

\--

  


  
The day that Harry is born, squirming, tiny, the most terrifying creature Sirius has ever seen, it rains. It is a hot, thick rain: sticky, perspiring, clinging to their noses and eyelashes and pooling in the insides of their ears and adhering to their joints and bony spines.   
  
James paces in the kitchen with his specs fogged up, for forty-five minutes.   
  
Peter is wearing blue galoshes.   
  
Remus arrives late, from somewhere silent. And stands in the corner of the bedroom. And drips on the carpet and presses his wide and helpless smile into the palm of his hand.   
  
And no matter how, Sirius realizes, with a cold and clammy gut, a thudding behind his temples, no matter how weak and hopeful he is then, at that, moment – when he sees him and that odd-familiar face and that bundle of crooked joints cobbled carefully into a man, like seeing him is new again, like knowing him here in this space is the last, lost whispered syllable that completes the rush – no matter how, it all dies fast and quiet, like a small bird, when he holds the body of this new and human child in his hands.  He looks at Remus, who is suddenly, softly, quietly, all blurred around the edges.  And Remus does not look at him.    
  
It has no weight, he thinks, against this effortless worship.   
  
“Hullo, Harry,” he says.   
  
He cups the baby against his chest, and feels how fast and strange and perfect the tiny heartbeat is. It has nowhere to catch. It belongs entirely to this small body, thinks Sirius, and no one else. I would do anything, he thinks, anything, anything, I would do the worst thing in the world, to keep it this way.   
  
He dips his head, a little, and closes his eyes.   
  
“I love you,” he whispers.   
  
It is a secret, after all.   
  
---


	6. The Poetry Is In The Pity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the beginning, the middle, and something of an end.

**PART VI** ****

**The Poetry Is In The Pity**

  
  
It is early spring, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and Sirius is fourteen years old when he steps through the front doors of Grimmauld Place, still wearing his school tie, which means that his Father will not touch him, and that the foyer portrait of Grandfather Pollux makes a sound of disgust, and spits on the frame.  
  
“In his room, Sirius,” says Father. “Mind that you aren’t in the way.”  
  
And Sirius takes the stairs one-by-one-by-one-by-one, and he does not take off his boots, so that he can still be shouted at later, if he feels like it, for making an awful, unnecessary racket (and generally existing, ha-ha, he thinks).  
  
For six hours, he sits at the end of the bed and watches Regulus sleep. A Healer with a peaked, grey cap and a big glass eye takes Regulus’s temperature three times, feeds him a potion twice, and runs scabby-looking palms over the back of Regulus’s neck. He knows that Mother stops once outside the door. He hears the ghoul upstairs shuffle morosely through the corridor and kick its heavy, chained feet against the door to the attic. And Kreacher brings a cup of tea and a bowl of broth for Regulus, and Sirius lets them go cold, and he reads a bit of James’s letter, which arrives just after sundown, and he counts the number of times Regulus shifts in his sleep. He supposes that he would get awfully tired of being so sick all the time, too, if it were him, and if they were all so concerned as to actually demand him here (and _existing_ ), it must be enough to make someone sleep for days and days.  
  
Kreacher comes to collect the untouched dishes, and makes a gurgling, hissing noise at Sirius, when he looks at him.  
  
“Oh, go suck a doxy,” says Sirius. “How long has it been?”  
  
“Master Regulus has had a fever for six nights,” hisses Kreacher. “Since he was retrieved from Hogwarts.”  
  
“They say he’s going to die,” says Sirius, with James’s letter in his hands.  
  
Kreacher’s eyes turn the colour of rotted bark, of dead skin and oil, and he disappears with a crack that shakes the walls.  
  
Regulus wakes just after midnight, when Sirius has just started to make spitballs out of James’s letter (he has seriously maimed three vicious-looking floral patterns on Regulus’s wallpaper).  
  
“What,” says Regulus, and it sounds like torn paper.  
  
Sirius glares at him. “They told me to come back,” he says. “I’ve come, so.”  
  
Regulus’s hair is plastered, damp, to his temples, and is sticking straight up in the back where it has been lying skewed on the pillows. “Have I missed class,” he asks.  
  
“What,” Sirius sighs. “Are you even - “  
  
“Sirius?”  
  
“Shut up, all right?” he snaps, and presses his palm against Regulus’s ankle, over the blankets. “Just, shut up, you’ve no clue what you’re - “  
  
“I want to - “ says Regulus, and lifts a hand, lifts his body, and his skin is so thin Sirius thinks he can see through it, to the bone and blood and out the other side.  
  
He leans forward. “I don’t care,” he says. “Keep your stupid head on, all right? It’s fine.”  
  
“I need to get up,” says Regulus, solemn; glassy eyes fixed firmly on Sirius’s face, and it makes his chest tight with anger.  
  
Sirius snorts. “You can’t even speak in full sentences,” he mutters.  
  
“But I _can_ ,” whispers Regulus, fiercely, fingers tight on Sirius’s arm, the knuckles gone white. “I can stand.”  
  
“Bloody hell you can,” says Sirius, and takes his elbow, and he wants to smack him across the back of the head or across his face until that awful, stupid, tepid, opiated look is shaken right out of him.  
  
“I could stand,” he whispers, as if truly, truly believes every inane word coming from his chapped lips and dry tongue and heat-addled brain. “And be - “  
  
“I don’t care,” Sirius snaps. “Will you just shut up, you’ll wake everyone and I’ll get hell for it, won’t I?”  
  
“Be more than this,” he says, and he has not heard a word that Sirius has said, and his fingers are still pressing painfully into Sirius’s arm, and it is the first time since last summer, Sirius thinks, probably, that they have touched.  
  
“I’ll show you,” says Regulus. “Please.”  
  
Sirius frowns; Regulus is looking past him, looking _at_ something over his shoulder, in the sort of way that makes his hair prickle on his wrists and nape.  
  
“Fine,” he spits. “ _Fine_ , if it’ll just. If you’ll just stop - “ he takes Regulus by the elbow and by a damp fistful of his nightshirt and hauls him up to sitting, and Regulus - with his stupid wobbly spine and his idiotic, fever-pink face and hot, ashy skin - pushes on Sirius’s shoulders, on his chest, and on his forearm, until he is standing by the bed, with someone else’s body for support.  
  
“There,” says Sirius, sleepless, irritated, and ill-practiced in being careless, he thinks. “There, fine, you’re up. Now back to bed, you - “  
  
Regulus exhales, heavily. “Wait,” he says, and he sounds almost sane.  
  
He looks to the window, where the heavy drapes are drawn-halfway, and through the sliver of sight there is the night sky and the hazy, spelled-distant streetlamps of London, and the smoke curling from chimneys and the sounds of cobblestones, of bells, of crabgrass growing in-between sidewalk cracks, of gulls and pigeons, and spiders and mice, of the moon, of the skitter of wind on the shingles of other people’s houses, of the barking of a dog and a train, somewhere.  
  
“All right,” he says, finally, quietly; his spine seems to sag slightly inside his skin, eyelids closing. “All right. I think. It will be fine now.”  
  
Sirius has his hands on his brother’s shoulders; he is holding him up, and Regulus has just told him it will all be fine, now, and this is an odd moment, he thinks, where they can pause and hear the world, and the world sounds only like their own syncopated breathing and their own simple heartbeats, and Regulus’s surprising, feverish conviction in the rightness of it. And Sirius thinks, _how do you know._  
  
He thinks, how could you ever trust anyone with that.  
  
He thinks, how could you ever trust yourself, like that.

  
\--  
  
  
It is late fall.  It is even early winter, now, at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and Remus is twenty-one years old when he climbs the stairs.  It has been two months or so.  Two months or so of a slow and steady bleed-out of his carefully-cultivated resistance to headlines, to celebrations, to revelry and happiness and carousing to the deafening tune of New Freedoms and a New Era.  And it has been two months or so, of memorializing inane objects, like dishes and cutlery, and pieces of lint and ugly furniture, of packed boxes and picture frames, of two, sharp-fat pieces of moonlight, of fever, momentary insanity, of steadfast denial.  
  
But it has been two months or so.  The end is near, they say.  Alastor Moody said it, today, in the buttercream-light of the Three Broomsticks, behind a thick curtain of scars and freshly-cropped hair.  _Lad_ , he'd said,  _Almost over now._    
  
Remus had wanted to say, _I don't know what that means._ He'd wanted to say _, will I have to see him, if I go.  Will I have to go,_ he'd wanted to say.  He wanted to say, _what if, what if I'm there, and everyone else is there, and there are people standing in the pews of justice with that already-verdict in their throats, and in my throat there's nothing but that verdict, too, or there's nothing but nothing like it.  What if I'm there, what if I stand there_ , he thinks,  _and what if he looks at me._    
  
_What if he looks at me_ , he thinks, when he climbs the stairs, _and it's not over at all._  
  
He rents a small room from a old woman, now.  it is vaguely dark but vaguely happy; the mirrors laugh at him, and the wallpaper seems to be doing its best to make him vomit, most of the time, but there are oil paintings of dancing wood nymphs in the stairwell, and the kitchen is painted yellow, as if it is trying very hard.  And it proceeds accordingly, like he had started to wish for, on the odd day or night or speck of spinning time when he would look at the kettle, or an old jumper (full-of-moth-holes-and-smells), or a piece of familiar toast-with-cheese left half-eaten on his plate, and then he would look at his own hand, his own wrist, his own ankle or freckled thigh and think, _oh_.  
  
His days are very simple.  It has been two months or so of very simple days.  He will wake, and stand under the shower, and towel himself off, and wrap himself in a dressing gown, and brush his teeth, and comb out his hair, and go out into the tiny room with the vomitous wallpaper and the tiny window with the sprawling view of London's crooked, quirking rooftops, and he will drink a cup of tea.  Some days, it takes longer than others.  Some days, it takes no time at all, and then sometimes, before he is even dressed, he will realize that it is suddenly early evening, and the sky is gone, and London is a strange and dark and strangling blur outside his window.    
  
And some days, the rising hot-white-winter sun over the chimneys lets him know that today - _this moment,_ today - would be the perfect sort of morning to pull on his coat, wrap his scarf around his neck, walk out the door, storm the cliffs of Azkaban, and kill Sirius Black himself.    
  
But today, this today, he sheds his hat and boots in the doorway (and he doesn't read the _Prophet,_ he doesn't pick it up from the table where it sits, until he will toss it in the bin, tomorrow morning).  And here, today, he stands by the window in his stocking feet, with his hands in his pockets, with the image of Alastor Moody's rolling eye gouging out the last scraps of his collected sanity, with the taste of chips and ale still on his teeth, and the thought of facing the world, just this once-and-for-all, to say: _He did it.  It was him.  He did it, and it's done._    
  
And it stops him there.  It doesn't go on from there, he thinks.  How can it go on from there, what is it that's left once that's done, once that's said?  Maybe it will be over, and maybe it won't, and maybe the day after that, I'll still be Remus Lupin climbing the stairs to the room with the ugly wallpaper.  Or maybe I won't, and I won't know anything at all.  It had been so ephemeral, after all. The strange weeks where he would look up from a book or the table or open a door and he would be so stunned, simply; the world would have to slink away into the cracks of his head: stealing heatbeats, breathing, the simple machinations of left-right-left-right, this is a tree, a rock, a door, the sky, this is a chair, this an apple, this is your body, that is a thought about Sirius Black.  That every thought is a thought about Sirius Black.     
  
And the _almost over_ , that edge of possibility, he realizes, he knows, he thinks, it's never that it is _almost_ : it just never _is_ , it never _will_.  It's _always_ , he thinks.  From the moment that a small boy turned to another small boy on the staircase of Gryffindor Tower, and said, _Oi, aren't you the one -_ well, he thinks, that was where _almost_ could have been.  And from the moment that a slightly-taller boy turned to another slightly-taller boy and said, _We know, you know, it's all right, we don't_ care _, it's only you don't have to_ lie _about it, for christ's sake, you know_ \- that, he thinks, was where they beat _almost_ to the ground: a bloody, writhing, dying pulp of possibility.  And when a taller-still boy turned to another taller-still boy again, and hissed, _I would have killed for you! -_ well, he thinks, that was the end of poor, old _almost_ , after all.   
  
What a cruel measure of character, he thinks.  How badly I failed, he thinks.  Whoever invented second chances should be stabbed in the back of the knees and left to rot, he thinks.  You can never forget enough to begin again, he thinks.  You can distill your life to the points of an obituary, he thinks, and there will still be those things that you can never change: That he was born, once.  That he continued to grow older every year.  That he knows a hero by name and the smell of his baby-skin.  That he knows a villain by his touch and his existence spelled out in malevolent anagram.  That he knows a monster by the shift of his heartbeat at sunset and the gothic-English print of a government manuscript and old exam questions.  That he has heard stories, cries, laughs, obedience, lies, anger, apologies, spells, insults, niceties, prophecies, eulogies.  That he has always been rather bad with goodbyes.  
  
That once, weeks ago, he had looked at a photograph of Harry Potter sleeping in his crib, with his tiny thumb in his tiny mouth, and was full of hatred.  Like a pinpoint of stillness, like the particular clarity when the mind is dulled by age or amnesia; it was that he had hated every bone in that small body, every pulse and strand of hair. It was not anger. It was not twisted empathy. It was that he could feel the scream on the inside of his teeth.  
  
( _Everything that has been taken from you was mine first!_ )  
  
It should have been mine, he thinks.  
  
_It should have been mine, first._  
  
And so he thinks he has learned his lesson, after all.  
  
“So,” he says, standing by the window, which is closed, and slightly cool; London is purple and soulless and existing, in the dusk outside.  Let’s give this a try, he thinks.  There will be a time later, he thinks, won’t there be.  So practice, he thinks.  For the crowd.  For me.  For your last bits of life.  For later.  So.  
  
“I love you,” he says, to the empty.  
  
“So,” he says, and presses a hand to the windowpane, smudging his life into the barriers of it all.  “So, there's that.”  
  
  
  
  
---


End file.
